Cape Town International ranked third-best airport in the world

What makes an airport great? Like much in life, it’s not a case of more being more (as impressive as Saudi’s King Fahd, Singapore’s Changi or Turkey’s Istanbul airports might be), it’s ultimately down to three factors: being on time, what your customers think of you, and the food and shopping experience. 

Cape Town International might be small fry compared with some of the world’s more impressive airports, but it has just been ranked third best in the world, out of 194 of the biggest and best-known airports.

The latest AirHelp Score for 2023 looked at flights taken from 1 January to 30 September 2023, and whittled down a list of 4,000 airports in their database to 194, based on flight traffic data and reports from air travellers. 

AirHelp, a claims management company, assists passengers in getting compensation from airlines when their flights are cancelled, delayed or overbooked. It professes to help passengers receive up to $700 compensation, no matter the ticket price, on a no-win, no-fee basis. Fees are deducted from the compensation they win for passengers: the standard fee is 35%, or 50% if a case goes to court.

These are the deciding factors in its airport ranking: 

On-time performance, which contributes 60% of the score, is defined as any flight that arrives within 15 minutes of its published arrival time. Data is cross-referenced with a variety of reliable sources such as government agencies, airport data, flight-tracking vendors and historical resources. The higher the score out of 10, the higher the percentage of on-time flights.

Customer opinion

Food and shops

Placings

The worst