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The summer of 2025 hasn’t got off to the best start for travellers. Air traffic controller strikes in France are causing ructions across Europe and last week, power outages and IT failures resulted in delayed trains and cancelled flights throughout Spain.

 

Looking back, last summer wasn’t without its hiccups either and plenty of holidaymakers had their plans disrupted by yet more strikes and system bungles. There’s nothing worse than using valuable annual leave, booking that longed-for vacation and then having your flight cancelled.

 

With the new summer holiday season upon us, did you ever stop to wonder if maybe there’s a trend to these axed flights? Well, wonder no more, as passenger rights website Flightright has done the work for us and discovered which airline is the most unreliable, and the result might just surprise you.

 

Flightright looked at the 20 airlines with the highest number of departures from Spain during the period from May to August 2024.

 

The study found that the airline with the highest cancellation rate last summer was none other than British Airways, which axed 3.96% of all its flights from Spain.

 

BA was followed a long way out by easyJet, with a 1.58% cancellation rate and Eurowings, with 1.50%.

On the other end of the scale, SwiftAir didn’t cancel a single flight from Spain during summer 2024, nor did Transavia.com or CanaryFly.

 

The other airlines frequently used for flights out of Spain landed somewhere in the middle: Vueling (0.95%), Ryanair (0.16%), Air Europa Express (0.12%), Air Europa (0.07%), Iberia (0.03%), Volotea (0.02%) and Iberia Express (0.01%).

 

In terms of delay rates, British Airways (46.26%) also leads the way as the airline with the highest proportion of late flights. Here, it’s followed by easyJet (41.57%) and Transavia.com (39.03%). In contrast, the most punctual airlines last summer were TUI Airways (1.58%), SwiftAir (1.89%) and Volotea (7.17%).

 

This poor performance by the British carrier can’t be blamed on the huge number of flights it operates either. While it’s true that BA is a significant player when it comes to Spain-UK routes, in terms of overall operations it comes well behind budget giants such as easyJet and Jet2.

 

 

The summer has barely begun so the data is fairly scant, but Flightright has analysed the numbers so far this year as well.

 

At the European level, Finnair leads the cancellation ranking with a rate of 3.35%, followed by KLM (2.04%) and British Airways (1.58%). On the more favourable side of the ranking are ITA Airways and Turkish Airlines, with a more-or-less zero cancellation rate (0% and 0.01% respectively), as well as Iberia, which has only recorded 12 cancellations so far this year, also representing 0.01% of its operations.

 

In terms of delays, the airline with the worst performance is TAP Air Portugal, with more than 37.14% of its flights departing outside the scheduled time. It’s followed by Air France (22.65%) and Swiss International (22.42%).

 

In absolute terms, the airlines with the highest number of flights delayed by more than 15 minutes are: Ryanair with 77,019 flights; easyJet with 39,871; and KLM with 26,626.

 

 

Image: Archive