The Association of European Airlines (AEA) has published its quarterly Consumer Report, which includes details of member airlines’ punctuality and baggage delivery performance for the period from July to September.
Performance overall declined, although this was to be expected since the period covered includes the events of August, when a security scare caused chaos at UK airports.
Member airlines include the UK’s British Airways and bmi. Virgin Atlantic and Aer Lingus are also AEA members but declined to contribute their figures to the report.
The punctuality of short and medium haul flights across Europe fell to 77 per cent, down from 80 per cent in 2005. British Airways was among the worst performing, with only 66 per cent of its arrivals and departures being on time. Bmi performed slightly better, with more than three quarters of its flights (76 per cent) on time.
Icelandair was worst performing (58 per cent of arrivals on time), but the Scandinavian airline did perform best in terms of flight regularity (a measure of how many scheduled flights actually take off). Best for short-haul punctuality was Luxair, which also performed well in the previous three-month period.
In terms of long-haul flight punctuality, BA and bmi again performed poorly, with 55 and 59 per cent of their arrivals on time, respectively. Best for on-time long-haul flights were KLM and CSA Czech Airlines; Finnair and Austrian also performed well.
bmi suffered in terms of long-haul flight regularity, too, with only Malev Hungarian Airlines coming off worse.
Baggage irregularities were up from 15.6 per 1,000 passengers to 18.9 for the period, although the AEA points out that the vast majority of these were returned to their owners with a minimum of delay.
British Airways fared worse than any other airline in terms of missing baggage, losing 30.7 bags per 1,000 passengers. This was caused primarily by the introduction of tight security measures at Heathrow in August, which led to thousands of bags going astray.
The British flag-carrier had to hire lorries to reunite bags with their owners and accused airport operator BAA of not having an adequate plan in place to deal with an emergency.
Turkish Airlines lost the fewest bags (4.5 per 1,000) over the quarter, followed by Air Malta (4.8) and Adria Airways (9.3).
The AEA is a non-profit organisation that represents the interests of 31 established European airlines, which carry 320 million passengers between them each year.
