What the league measures.

Source and snapshot

We use the boarding, comfort and crew ratings recorded from KAYAK’s airline review pages on 23 October 2026. KAYAK states that its flight reviews come from customers with confirmed bookings. The ratings accumulate over time and cover different journeys, cabins and review periods. This is a dated snapshot, not a survey limited to flights taken in 2026. Live pages may now show different values.

The three measures

Equal weights are an editorial choice: the index gives the three aspects the same importance. They come from one review system and may reflect the same respondents, so they are not three independent surveys.

Calculating the points

Each source rating is out of ten. We add the three ratings, divide the total by three and multiply by ten. We then round the result to the nearest whole point. The same calculation applies to every airline. No missing rating is estimated, and an entry without all three ratings cannot be scored.

For example, Korean Air’s recorded ratings are 8.5 for boarding, 8.3 for comfort and 8.7 for crew. Their average is 8.5, giving 85 points out of 100. Points are a rescaled average, not the percentage of passengers who are satisfied.

Assigning the three leagues

Airlines are ordered by their rounded points. Premier League targets the first 20% of places, rounded up. League One extends to the first 60% of places, rounded up, and League Two contains the remainder. With 59 airlines, the target boundaries are positions 12 and 36.

Airlines with equal points share a competition rank: two airlines ranked first are followed by rank three. Ties are listed alphabetically and are never split between divisions. All airlines tied at a boundary enter the higher division. This produces the following groups for this edition.

These score bands follow from this edition’s results. They are not permanent quality thresholds.

Coverage and airline identity

The starting list contained the 49 airlines in Cirium’s regional 2025 punctuality tables and 11 additional carriers selected for comparison. Spirit Airlines was removed after it ceased operations, leaving 59 entries. This selection reflects data availability and the original research shortlist; it is not an exhaustive or representative sample of the world’s airlines.

Each entry represents a KAYAK airline review profile, identified under a familiar brand name. The three ratings always come from that single profile. We retain the provider’s aggregation and do not attribute the result separately to every subsidiary, route, aircraft or cabin. JetSMART is therefore labelled as the review-profile brand, rather than as a verified Chile-only operator.

Reading the results

Whole-number points avoid implying precision to tenths of an index point. They do not remove uncertainty. Close scores and adjacent league places should not be treated as proof of meaningful differences in service. League Two identifies the lower-scoring part of this selected field, not the world’s worst airlines.

An asterisk marks profiles displaying fewer than 100 ratings in the snapshot: Airlink 92, flyadeal 81 and South African Airways 65. This is a caution flag, not a statistical confidence threshold. The displayed total is not a sample size for each measure. Review totals do not change an airline’s weight or points.

The reviewers are not a random sample of all passengers. Differences in routes, cabins, review dates and expectations remain unadjusted. We cannot estimate statistical confidence intervals from the published aggregates.

Measures outside this edition

Punctuality is excluded because consistent source coverage and a common operating period were not available across the full field. Flight completion, compensation handling and booking transparency are also outside the score. Food, entertainment and KAYAK’s overall rating are not used; food and entertainment offerings differ substantially between airline business models. Safety, fares, baggage handling and emissions are not assessed.

Verification and updates

All 59 point totals, ranks and league assignments were rebuilt from the recorded source ratings and checked. This page lists the source profiles below; the providers’ full datasets are not reproduced. The provider’s records and individual respondents were not independently audited.

The 23 October snapshot remains fixed for this edition. Later changes to individual source pages are not selectively added. Any future refresh should collect the full field again, carry a new snapshot date and recalculate all standings under the stated method.

Sources and review profiles

External source links open in a new tab. Live review pages may show different values from the fixed 23 October 2026 snapshot.

1. KAYAK explanation of how reviews are collected
2. Cirium 2025 regional tables used to establish the original shortlist
3. Spirit Airlines announcement filed with the SEC on 2 May 2026