Virgin Atlantic Airways cut to a 3-Star Airline status, reflecting a decline in quality levels

Airline research organisation, SKYTRAX, say the latest 2011 Star Rating analysis sees Virgin Atlantic Airways cut to a 3-Star Airline status, reflecting a decline in quality levels

Edward Plaisted, Chairman and CEO of Skytrax said: "Virgin Atlantic has been a long-standing 4-Star Airline, and was well known for many pioneering product and service initiatives during it's history. More recently they seem to have undergone an image building exercise with glossy advertising, but the projected standards are just not being delivered to customers at this time, and our audit analysis is pointing to the fact that Virgin Atlantic are currently suited to 3-Star Airline ranking."

"Monitoring quality across more than 250 airlines worldwide, we are careful not to allow an Airline Rating to be impacted by any very short term quality changes" added Plaisted, "but we have seen the decline in service quality and many product areas to be too prolonged over the last 12 months with Virgin Atlantic to defer this final review to 3-Star Airline ranking. From a personal viewpoint it is also a sad moment, because Virgin Atlantic Airways was the first airline that Skytrax used as a Competitive Benchmark back at our inception in 1989."

 
"The airline market has undergone massive change in recent times, and during a period when many European airlines have been slow to modernise their customer products and service concepts, we have witnessed the continued and rapid dominance from carriers in the Middle East and Asia. Some of the most rapid change is happening in the Chinese airline industry, which has been able to invest in new aircraft fleets together with achieving rapid and sustained improvements in customer service quality. In contrast, we have seen an air of almost complacency amongst European airlines towards some quality issues. Whilst they have been subject to greater financial pressure from rising oil costs and reduced consumer spending power in local markets, the airline industry is a global business, and our primary role at Skytrax is to ensure that a fair and equitable Quality Ranking is applied to airlines across the globe" added Plaisted.


Peter Miller-SkyTrax