AirHelp: a personal advisor when travelling by plane
The innovative Italian company ranking airlines and providing information for a journey without “bad surprises”
AirHelp stands out as an Italian company founded by regular travellers, tired of having troubles with airlines. Frequently, passengers need to deal with unexpected delays and cancellations that might create them significant damages.
For these reasons, AirHelp offers an online service to customers to get their money back in case of three hours minimum delay and cancellation. Many passengers are unaware of their rights and recent figures show that less than 2% of eligible individuals have issued a refund application.
AirHelp is today present in 17 countries and has helped more than 235,000 passengers to get their refund. Furthermore, the Italian company has recently elaborated a new rating system for airlines called AirHelp Score. The latter is the fruit of an attentive process of data gathering on airline companies that will help the passenger to predict how he will be treated in case of a delay, cancellation or overbooking.
In particular, AirHelp score has a maximum of 800 and it is used to measure the airlines' performances. It is based on five key-points, i.e. complain management (150 points); time to issue the refund (150 points); unfairly rejected complaints (150 points); on time arrivals (200 points); quality of service and product offered by the company (150 points).
As a result, a company ranked between 225 and 325 is definitely to be avoided; scores between 326-425 highlight a poor performance whereas 426 and 575 point out a medium service. Nonetheless, it is advisable that passengers opt to travel with companies ranked as good (576-625) or excellent (626-800).
At the moment, among the best companies we find AirBaltic, Austrian Airlines and Lufthansa, whereas the popular Easyjet was marked among the worst ones for its frequent delays and complaints rejection.
Finally, AirHelp presents a number of advantages. Firstly, it should help passengers when travelling to choose a reliable company. At the same time, it could work as a boost for airlines to improve their performance and increase their score.
Follow @castaritaHK
