Airline awards

I agree with The Cranky Flier's recent entry about best airline surveys.

Even with my extensive travelling (400 flights in 12 months on a wide range of routes on some 30 airlines in all clases) I do not feel equipped to make a definitive judgement about which airline is best. When I visited Wendy Perrin of The Perrin Post she asked me for my picks for best airline in several categories. I felt unable to answer from personal experience, although I offered a shortlist and referred to advice from the many thousands of frequent flyers on Flyer Talk.

There are a lot of industry awards and some results are rather strange. Like the year British Airways won Best Airline when it had a long running strike and terrible problems with baggage handling, or when Virgin Blue won Best Frequent Flyer Program - Australia just weeks after launching their Velocity Rewards FFP. With results like these I view such awards as popularity contests rather an indicator of which airline(s) have the best product, service, etc.