A consumer report covering Europe's mainline airlines has completed its first half year, for the first time showing where carriers stand in terms of delays, cancellations and lost baggage.
The figures have been compiled by the Association of European Airlines (AEA) and are provided by member carriers on a monthly voluntary basis. Although the AEA publishes monthly figures on airport delays, European carriers have previously shied away from following the example of their US counterparts in publishing monthly performance figures, arguing that these can be misleading.
The AEA numbers come ringed with cautions about possible misuse. "We should be careful not to make qualitative judgements based on the figures in this report," warns AEA manager market research, Sue Lockey. However, the report has already run into controversy as Ryanair took up the figures over the summer to use in its own publicity.
Ryanair operates point-to-point services between uncongested secondary airports, so it is perhaps not surprising that it claims to beat all AEA members in terms of punctuality. It claims a 92.5% on-time performance for June, ahead of SAS Scandinavian Airlines, the best performing AEA carrier, which posted 92.2% for on-time arrival. Lufthansa managed 86.5%, British Airways 79.3% and Air France 72.4%. Ryanair is not slow to point out that fellow Irish carrier Aer Lingus has not released its figures.
Ryanair makes a similar claim for lost baggage, where it declares a June figure of 0.5 lost pieces per 1,000 passengers - less than 0.05%.
The AEA complains bitterly that its reports have been "(mis)used by a non-member airline for publicity purposes". Ryanair's critics also point out that the figures do not include the delays on ground transportation to and from its often remote airports. Even at London Stansted passengers have had to take a replacement bus service this year during upgrade work on the rail link.
For the European major carriers, taking a straight average of the monthly reports does begin to demonstrate the gap in on-time performance (see table right). SAS and Finnair emerge as clear leaders in terms of both arrivals and departures. However, when it launched the reports earlier this year, the AEA warned that those carriers that operated more of their flights away from the most congested areas of Europe would have a natural advantage, as would those with a high proportion of short-haul flights where the length of delays tends to be shorter.
Yet Alitalia and TAP Air Portugal, with relatively limited long-haul services, emerged as the worst of the major carriers. Lufthansa and KLM were also consistently better than Air France and British Airways, albeit all are in mid-table.
Some note, however, that departure performance is measured from the time that an aircraft leaves the gate, not when it takes off. So it is possible that the figures will vary depending upon whether a delayed aircraft waits on the tarmac or at the gate for a take-off slot.
KLM and Air France topped the league of lost baggage - both with a high proportion of transfer traffic. Here too, though, the AEA gives a caution, pointing out that under existing regulations, the carrier that flies the final leg of a journey is responsible for lost baggage irrespective of who actually caused the error. This therefore penalises carriers that fly a high proportion of passengers transferring from other airlines.
January was the worst month, with only 72% of arrivals and 76% of departures on time for the leading 10 carriers. This was due to adverse weather conditions, and also had a knock-on affect for baggage arriving on late flights.
COLIN BAKER LONDON
Source: Airline Business
