South African Airways Named One of Top 5 Best Airlines in the WORLD!

It may come as a surprise to many in South Africa… but South African Airways (SAA) has been named as one of the Top 10 Airlines in the World, according to an international survey. In fact SAA made it into the Top 5.

It clearly wasn’t being measured for financial performance – SAA’s “horror show” financials have been in the spotlight lately with the recent Auditor General’s report revealing the national carrier incurred a net loss of R5.57-billion in the last financial year, and its liabilities exceeded assets by R17.8 billion.

But the good news is that the South African airline knows how to keep passengers happy by being on time… compensating them for delays.

According to the new survey by AirHelp, SAA scores 8.5 for being on time, 7.8 for its quality of service, and 8.7 in its dealings with claims.

AirHelp says “air travel is about more than just the price of a ticket”, and its survey compares airlines around the world with three different critera: the quality of amenities, on-time arrivals, and how well they resolve flight delay compensation claims.

SAA scored above Qantas (8th) and Virgin (10th). The worst ranked airlines included Air Mauritius (68th), EasyJet (69th) and the very cheap Wow Air in last position at 72nd.

Nikki Ekstein, from Bloomberg, reported that on a trip to South Africa last year she suffered five bad flights – on the first, a 15-hour flight from New York to Joburg her air vent and seat-back screens were both broken. She says the other four flights were “only marginally better”.

BUT, she says, when she wrote to SAA to complain after her holiday, “staff apologized quickly and gave me a mileage credit. It didn’t undo the terrible flights, but the swift show of humanity is rare in the aviation industry.”

AirHelp says SAA has a “fantastic claims-processing score” and a good track record of keeping flights on time.

“Irregularities in flights are going to happen. What’s important is whether the airline has planned for that so they can make the experience less hellish for the consumer,” says AirHelp.

Unfortunately no South African airports featured in the top 10 airport list. The top four places went to Doha (Qatar), Athens (Greece), Tokyo (Japan) and Cologne Bonn (Germany); whilst Paris Orly (France), Lyon (France), London Stansted (UK) and Kuwait were in the bottom four.

The airports were rated by statistics on their quality of service, on-time performance, and the passenger experience of a given airport, “thanks to analysis conducted on Twitter”.

AirHelp helps passengers fight back in court by exposing airlines’ “ineptitude for properly informing passengers of their rights”. Their goal is to make claiming compensation as easy and seamless as possible.

View the full survey on AirHelp here:
www.airhelp.com/en/airhelp-score/airline-ranking/

View Bloomberg’s report:
www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-06/the-best-and-worst-airlines-and-airports-of-2018