AirHelp Score 2025: How did we rank the airports?
This year's airport ranking is here — just in time for the busy summer travel season. Whether you're a frequent flier, planning your next vacation, or simply curious about airports, this is your go-to snapshot of how the world's biggest and best-known airports stack up.
This year, we ranked 250 airports from 68 countries.
Where does the data come from?
To deliver a dependable ranking, we combine our extensive internal flight database with firsthand passenger feedback on airport facilities and experiences.
The flights analyzed span from 1 June 2024 to 31 May 2025.
There are over 4,000 airports in our database, which we whittled down to 250, 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 important 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’?
A flight arriving within 15 minutes of its scheduled arrival time is considered on-time. For this year's score, we looked at flights from 1 June 2024 to 31 May 2025.
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 13,500 unique airport ratings.
We asked travelers to rate the airports they had most recently used, based 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
Airport dining and shopping can make or break your journey. So we asked travelers what they thought about the shops and restaurants at the airports they’d visited.
Passengers rated each airport on a scale from ‘very good’ to ‘very bad’. We gave each rating a numeric value, and added them 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!