Skift Take
No doubt certain airlines and passengers will have something to say on how we could have made this rating system better, but we feel it’s a good start. Operators are standing by to take your calls with comments, but they don’t work for us and they may have no idea what you’re talking about.
We’ve put on our thinking caps to develop a rating methodology which helps us determine the best cabin experiences around the world.
We wanted a system which put the very subjective “best” in an objective context. After much hard work, we’re proud to present our first Best Economy Long-Haul Experience results.
We haven’t found a sound metric available which isn’t clouded by dubious associations and methodologies. There are passenger ratings systems which are more reliable, such as those found on TripAdvisor and SeatGuru and the Passenger Choice Awards coordinated through a study by the Airline Passenger Experience Association (APEX). All of those are valid resources, but subject to an individual’s ability to judge their recent flight experience fairly in a larger context of the market. In other words, they may not reflect the average experience of the average passenger on the average flight.
We wanted to avoid these biases as much as possible. We also wanted to consider the overall passenger experience point-to-point, and to give ratings which, though always subjective, could be justified as equitable.
As a result of all this factor refining, research, evaluation and number crunching, we’ve come up with the Skift Airlines Ratings system. Is it perfect? No. Hardly. It’s one we plan to continue to work on and refine, but we hope you’ll find it a good start.
Airlines were chosen from around the world, broken up by the international travel markets. In order to trim down this to a manageable number, we included airlines that our readers were most likely to have reason to fly, based on the larger numbers of daily departures and destinations each airline offered. This meant some airlines which we would very much have liked to include were left out. They were simply smaller than competitors in their region, but may appear in other ratings in future. By using this approach, we represent the big three alliances, and put like competitors to equal scrutiny. We include the numbers here so that you can see how the airlines rate by relative size.
We judged long-haul as a flight from the airline’s major hub to a major hub in Europe or the U.S., as appropriate. Wherever possible, we pulled information directly from the airline, but we did resort to SeatGuru and Routehappy for certain cabin features an airline might not have listed. We did not take these
