The best airlines are like Rick Astley: They're never going to give you up, never going to let you down -- and they're definitely never going to run around and desert your claims.
But in August alone, passengers filed 2,205 complaints against airlines. The top complaints -- unsurprisingly -- were about flight problems including cancellations, delays and missed connections, and baggage.
AirHelp, a startup that helps collect compensation for airline customers, released an infographic on Tuesday, giving airlines a score based on their helpfulness in trying times.
"We wanted to know who would get you to your destination on time, and how they would respond when things went wrong," Nicholas Michaelsen, co-founder of AirHelp, told Mashable.
After condensing ratings from Skytrax and FlightStats, AirHelp added their own data from customers seeking help with claims. They tallied how often the airlines wrongfully rejected claims, the time taken to acknowledge a claim and how long the airlines took to pay out compensation.
"It’s the aggregation of two and a half years of data that hasn’t been published anywhere else before," said Michaelsen.
AirHelp gave 27 airlines -- inclusion was based on the amount of data the company had -- a score out of 800. The higher the score, the more likely the airline is to get you to your destination on time and treat you well if, for some reason, your flight is delayed or cancelled.
How airlines ranked
The highest scoring airlines were:
AirBaltic - 650Austrian Airlines - 500Lufthansa - 450
However, only AirBaltic received a score that placed it in AirHelp's "great" category -- the other two were deemed merely "fair."
The lowest scoring airlines were:
SATA International - 225TAP Portugal - 225US Airways (now part of American) - 250
"This isn’t to call out airlines -- we want to give them points where it’s possible to improve," said Michaelsen. "A lot of airlines will reject a viable claim. So, the first step to improving is actually abiding by the law, because airlines may choose to interpret the law differently. There’s no way around the law anymore."
Air passenger rights in the U.S. lag behind the standards set in Europe, but can offer bigger payouts for inconvenienced passengers. For example, in Europe, if you are denied boarding or if your flight is cancelled, you are entitled to a ticket refund. No such guarantee exists in the U.S., however, a two-hour delay or more on a domestic flight could make you eligible for compensation up to 400% of the one-way fare.
Getting compensated isn't easy, though. There are several organizations similar to AirHelp that are helping passengers navigate the gray areas of air rights for a portion of their compensation, like Refund.me, EUclaim and Flight-Delayed.
AirHelp hopes that customers will use its scores to broaden their perspectives and look at more than price when buying a flight.
"If you have a ticket that’s $5 cheaper, but you see the other airline has a higher AIrHelp score, that $5 could be a good investment," co-founder Henrik Zillmer told Mashable. "We want people to make [buying an airline ticket] a more conscious decision."