Rajiv Gandhi International Airport eighth best in the world

Rajiv Gandhi International Airport in Hyderabad has been named the world’s eighth best airport in its latest rankings by AirHelp, an organisation that assists air passengers in exercising their rights and works towards compensation in case of delayed or cancelled flights.

In its AirHelpScore 2019 – Global Airport Ranking, AirHelp said RGIA scored 8.27 points on a scale of 10, putting it in the eighth spot in the top 10 airports in the world.

According to AirHelp, airports were rated based on three factors — on-time performance, service quality, and food and shopping options. The first accounts for 60 per cent of the score and the other two criteria 20 per cent each. Besides its own database, AirHelp gathered data from multiple commercial vendors and 40,000-plus passenger surveys collected in 40 countries in 2018.

With respect to on-time performance, RGIA got a score of 7.8, on service quality it received a nine and on food and shops, it received a score of 8.8. Incidentally, RGIA shared its service score with just one other airport – Athens International – and was behind only the Singapore Changi airport, which scored 9.2 on this parameter.

The world’s top three airports, according to AirHelp, are Hamad International in Doha, Tokyo International in Japan and



Athens International in Greece.

AirHelp said this year’s score examined and ranked 133 of the world’s airports that were chosen based on the best-known and most-used airports. It said airports for which it could not obtain data were excluded from the rankings.

With respect to on-time performance, any flight that departed within 15 minutes of its published departure time and arrived within 15 minutes of its published arrival time was treated as ‘on-time’ flight. For its latest rankings, AirHelp looked at flights between January 1 and December 31, 2018. It said, for instance, if an airport received a score of 8.5 on this parameter, it meant that 85 per cent of flights were on time.

For assessing the quality of service for both airports and airlines, over 40,000 people were surveyed in more than 40 countries. It said three factors — customer service, security wait times, and cleanliness — were rated on a scale of one to five— from very good to very bad. The higher the score, the better the airport did across all of these service factors, AirHelp said.

The third aspect on which the airports were rated was food and shops, and the results once again relied on passenger inputs on two types of amenities — shopping and food options — also on a scale of one to five.