Johannesburg – Emirates has been named the World’s Best Airline 2016 at the Skytrax World Airline Awards 2016, in addition to scooping up the awards for World’s Best Inflight Entertainment for a record 12th consecutive year, and Best Airline in the Middle East.
Based on the results of the largest airline passenger satisfaction survey in the industry, the World’s Best Airline Awards are considered a global benchmark of airline excellence. This year’s Skytrax awards were based on a total of 19.2 million completed surveys covering 280 airlines, by customers hailing from more than 104 countries.
The Skytrax survey measures quality standards across 41 key performance indicators of front-line products and services in the airline industry.
This is the fourth time Emirates has won the top accolade since the airline awards were introduced 15 years ago; the airline won the first ever Skytrax World’s Best Airline in 2001, again in 2002 and in 2013. In total, Emirates has won a total of 20 Skytrax World Airline Awards since 2001.
Over the past 12 months, Emirates has rolled out a number of new product and service investments, including the unveiling of a new 777-300ER Business Class seat; expanding its global Emirates Lounge network to 39 with the opening of new facilities in Cape Town; launching new children’s toys and activity kits both on board and in the lounges and new amenity kit bags for First and Business Class travellers; and investing over $140m in its wine programme for all cabin classes in 2015 alone.
On most of Emirates’ fleet, including all of its A380 aircraft, passengers in all classes can enjoy unprecedented Wi-Fi connectivity. On average, over a quarter of all passengers use the internet during their flight. This figure increases to half on flights over 12 hours.