WASHINGTON: Following the Forbes Travel Guide’s Verified Air Travel Awards earlier this year, AirHelp has released its list of the world’s best airlines for 2025, drawing on extensive data collected between October 1, 2024, and September 30, 2025.
AirHelp is an online portal that helps passengers claim compensation for flight delays, cancellation, or overbooking.
Each airline was evaluated on three equally weighted criteria: on-time performance, customer opinion and claim processing efficiency. The result is an all-round picture of how airlines fared—not only in punctuality, but in how passengers felt about their journeys and how swiftly airlines resolved issues such as delays, cancellations and compensation claims.
This year, Qatar Airways reclaimed the title of world’s best airline, returning to the top spot for the first time since its five-year streak from 2018 to 2023. While the carrier placed only tenth for on-time performance and fifteenth for claim handling, its exceptionally strong customer ratings propelled it ahead of all competitors.
Etihad Airways secured second place, underscoring the continued dominance of Middle Eastern carriers, while the UK’s Virgin Atlantic followed closely in third. The top ten also includes airlines from Australia, Malta, Mexico, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Germany, and Poland, reflecting a geographically diverse field of high performers. One notable absence from the top rankings is Emirates. Despite being named the best international airline by the Forbes Travel Guide, it landed in sixteenth place on the AirHelp list—just above British Airways. Emirates performed strongly in customer opinion, placing second globally, but its overall standing was dragged down by a low score in claim processing, which assesses how effectively airlines handle passenger compensation.
American carriers again failed to make the global top ten. The highest-placed U.S. airline, American Airlines, ranked eleventh worldwide but still led the domestic list. It was followed by United Airlines in second place within the U.S., and Delta Air Lines in third. All three saw middling global positions, attributed largely to inconsistent claim handling and mixed customer perceptions.
Further down the U.S. list, Frontier Airlines, Hawaiian Airlines, Southwest, Alaska Airlines, and JetBlue rounded out the rankings, with all five ranking outside the global top 35. JetBlue, in particular, struggled this year, placing eighty-ninth worldwide.
