Skytrax (airline quality benchmarking)
Beyond the 5-star rating: Taking airline feedback to new heights
How Inqqa Express analysed the complete Skytrax airline survey — 1,135 passenger reviews across 10 questions, 19 airlines and 5 traveller segments — so the 5-star score finally comes with the reasons behind it.
The challenge
Skytrax evaluates airline quality worldwide through customer surveys, audits and operational data, and Skytraxratings.com pairs its well-known 5-star score with open-ended passenger feedback that is not used in the rating at all. The score therefore says how an airline performed without saying why. Six fixed quality topics frame the answer in advance, so an issue the model was not designed to look for cannot surface — and the survey's other nine questions (seat comfort, cabin staff service, food and beverages, in-flight entertainment, ground service, value for money, recommendation and wifi) were being read as separate averages that nobody joined up. Underneath all of it sat 1,135 free-text reviews across 19 airlines and nine months of travel: the detail that explains the score, in a volume no team can code by hand.
The solution
Inqqa Express analysed the whole survey rather than one column of it. All ten questions were profiled in a single pass: response rates and distributions for the nine closed questions, automatic topic detection over the open-text reviews, and statistical significance testing of every result against five background variables — airline, traveller type, seat class, trip verification and review month — so a difference counts as a finding only when the sample supports it. Where the closed and open halves meet, elaboration analysis uses the reviews themselves to explain the overall rating. Data quality is assessed before anything is reported, and every figure carries a citation back to the question and segment it came from, so any claim can be audited instead of taken on trust. Recommendation scoring and group comparisons run on the same pass, on the same numbers.
The results
Value for money is the weakest driver at 59.7% low ratings, ahead of ground service at 56.7% and wifi and connectivity at 54.2%, while cabin staff service is the clear relative strength at 44.4% high — and 68% of passengers would not recommend the airline they reviewed. Topic detection surfaced 13 named themes where the fixed model offers six, and several of them do not survive the old framing: delays and punctuality, refunds and compensation claims, in-flight connectivity and charging, and digital and contact channels each stand up as topics in their own right instead of dissolving into 'customer service'. Because significance is tested per airline and per segment, the report separates carriers rather than averaging them into one global score — and it flags where the evidence is thin, including 55.2% missing answers on wifi and 12% of respondents straight-lining the scale, so conclusions are not quietly built on the gaps.
Try it on your own survey
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