Skytrax Is Flawed, But So Are Everyone Else’s Rankings

Steven Ganeles·July 18, 2018

There over 5000 airlines in the world. Granted not all of those 5000 airlines are passenger airlines but there are still way to many options when you are looking to book a flight. Yesterday Skytrax released its list of the top airlines of 2018. a screenshot of a phone Singapore Airlines won airline of the year. While I think Skytrax did a good job at identifying some great airlines, I tend to disagree with their list in general. How Skytrax comes up with its rankings airlines isn’t exactly clear. This is because of weighting based off airline size, and its all subjective to how a respondent is feeling at the end of the day. Skytrax awards are more like a popularity contest rather than a “Best Of” list. What makes things even worse is that Skytrax allows for airlines to promote themselves during the voting period rather than the survey being objective.

Singapore Airlines New First Class Suite

For the 2018 ranking Skytrax claims to have over 20 million surveys from people of 100 different countries. They ask survey respondents to ranks airlines in 3 areas: Cabin Service, Ground/Airport, and Onboard Product.

The biggest problems I have with this years rankings

There isn’t that big of a difference between All Nippon Airways (Rank 3) and Japan Airlines (Rank 13)
Hainan and Lufthansa’s service might be good but most of their physical product isn’t top 10 worthy

Lets get this out of the way, I am not qualified to tell you what the best airlines are. I fly between 75,000-100,000 miles a year, mostly with American Airlines and other Oneworld carriers. That being said, I’ve still managed to fly with 12 different airlines over the past year alone and with well over 50+ carriers in my lifetime. While I feel qualified to talk to my experiences, I understand that each flight is unique and consistency is tough to come by which inevitably skews data more. Because I don’t have enough data over multiple flights on every airline I don’t feel that it is fair to rank an airline. Instead below are a list of my and the SamChui.com team’s favorite on board products in no particular order. I hope that eventually we can come up with a way to objectively rank airlines but until then this will have to do.