AoT rants over airport ranking

BANGKOK Thailand’s Airports of Thailand has challenged a popular airport ranking that places Suvarnabhumi Airport as the world’s ninth worst airport on a chart of 10 poor performers.

Specialising in safety and passenger rights AirHelp.com completed the ranking last April.

Suvarnabhumi airport was ranked in ninth place out of a total of 10 airports, deemed the worst in the world. The website said the study measured on-time performance, quality of service and passenger sentiments.

AirHelp, which assists customers to obtain compensation from airlines for flight delays, asked passengers to rate 76 international airports.

AoT’s Suvarnabhumi Airport said in a statement on its Facebook page that the airport welcomes criticism from service users and agencies conducting survey and ranking that can be used as useful information … to better meet the quality of service standards of the world’s leading airports.

However it criticised the website for not clarifying how the scores were calculated in the three main categories on-time performance, quality and service, and passenger sentiment.

The survey was based on data provided from December 2016 to March 2017.

Suvarnabhumi airport officials said they had not provided any information to the website regarding on-time performance, but Flight Stat, which collects real-time flight data, reported in May that Suvarnabhumi airport ranked 13th for its on-time performance in the category of global hub departure performance.

In addition, Suvarnabhumi airport said the reference to Skytrax in the “quality and service” score could not be verified.

The airport claimed it ranked 10th best airport in the world among airports serving more than 40 million passengers annually in 2016, by Airport Council International (ACI).

Both Mumbai and Delhi, which the website also ranked among the worst 10 airports, were ranked among the world’s top five airports in the same category as Suvarnabhumi by the ACI in 2016.

On passenger sentiment, Suvarnabhumi airport said that the website based its scores only on English language tweets processed through its own analysis tool, and the information was not “supported by any respected organisation”.

The inference was that it lacked input from Thai language tweets that might have lifted the ranking score.

The AirHelp website ranked 76 airports across the world scoring on how well the world’s big hubs are delivering quality services for passengers. The scores weight 45% on-time performance; 45% quality of service and 10% social media sentiment.

Kuwait airport was found to be the worst performing, according to the study.

The United Kingdom airports fared particularly poorly, with four airports, London Gatwick, Manchester, Stansted and Edinburgh also listed on the worst 10 chart.

AirHelp is a technology company that provides legal services to airline passengers who have experienced a flight cancellation, delay or overbooking. The company’s services are meant to educate and empower travellers to make full use of their consumer rights, and in turn raise the level of customer care provided by airlines.

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