AirHelp Score 2023: How did we rank the airports?
This year’s airport ranking is bigger than ever before. For 2023 we have assessed and ranked 194 of the world’s biggest and best known airports.
Where does the data come from? In order to ensure a reliable ranking, we’ve taken information on each airports’ on-time performance from our own extensive database, and combined it with passenger insight on the facilities and experience of using the airports.
This score looks at flights taken from 1st January to 30th September 2023.
There are over 4,000 airports in our database, which we whittled down to 194, based on the busiest airports according to flight traffic, and most popular with air travelers. We aim to rank the world’s major airports, but it’s worth noting that some are excluded due to a lack of data.
Three factors contribute to airport ranking. Here’s a breakdown:
On-time performance
In order to help passengers facing flight delays and cancellations, we have developed a database of flight data that we believe is among the most reliable and accurate in the world.
Thanks to our database, we can find the on-time flight departure and arrival statistics for every airport.
On-time Performance contributes 60% of the score.
What counts as ‘on time’?
We count any flight that arrived within 15 minutes of its published arrival time as an on-time flight. For this year's score, we looked at flights for the period of 1st January to 30th September 2023.
We calculated how many flights were on time and expressed this number as a percentage. The higher the score, the higher the percentage of on-time flights. For example, a score of 8.5 means 85% of flights were on time.
What makes the AirHelp database so reliable?
Data is gathered from multiple vendors and processed by us to create our sophisticated database.
We cross-reference data with a variety of reliable sources such as government agencies, airport data, flight-tracking vendors, and historical resources to ensure our database accuracy.
When we identify conflicting sources we do not 'estimate' or take an average. Instead, we rank our sources by authority, taking the most authoritative figure to be correct.
Customer opinion
To assess what passengers think of the airports, we simply asked them! We surveyed air travelers in more than 58 countries, and gathered over 15,800 unique airport ratings.
We asked travelers to rate the airports they had most recently visited on 4 factors:
Airport staff
Wait times
Accessibility
Cleanliness
We asked passengers to rate each airport for each factor on a scale from ‘very good’ to ‘very bad’. We gave each rating a numeric value, and combined all the ratings together to arrive at a final score. The higher the score, the better the airport did across all of these service factors.
Customer opinion contributes 20% of the score.
Food and shops
We also asked travelers to rate the shops and restaurants at the airports they’d visited.
Again, passengers rated each airport on a scale from ‘very good’ to ‘very bad’. We gave each rating a numeric value, and added these ratings together to arrive at a final score. The higher the score, the better passengers rate the shops and restaurants there.
Food and Shops contributes 20% of the score.
The Final Score
We take the score from each category into account, giving precedence to On-time Performance, as we believe this should out-weigh the importance of Service Quality and Food and Shops.
The breakdown of the final score is as follows:
On-time Performance contributes 60%
Service Quality contributes 20%
Food and Shops contributes 20%
Did you also know that you can claim compensation for delayed, canceled, or overbooked flights from up to 3 years ago? AirHelp is here to help you check if your flight is eligible — it’s quick, easy, and totally risk-free!
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