Worlds Best Airlines

Of every question we get asked, this is the one that never stops coming: after nearly 130 airlines, who actually does it best?

So we did what we always do — we made it a project. We pulled the trip's entire flight log (more than 400 flights and half a million miles, every boarding pass since we left home in March 2022), stacked it against every credible ranking on the internet — Skytrax, AirlineRatings, Condé Nast Traveler, Travel + Leisure, APEX — and let the two argue it out.

The internet's answer and ours mostly rhyme. Ten airlines kept rising to the top: the Gulf three, the East Asian perfectionists, Europe's great connector, and the airline our own logbook keeps quietly re-booking.

And then there is the top of the list. In January 2025 we boarded EY2 at JFK and turned left into The Residence — the three-room apartment at the front of an Etihad A380. A living room. A double bedroom. A shower at 38,000 feet. A butler. It reset our definition of what flying can be, and it decided our number one before the spreadsheet could.

This page is the full ranking: each airline scored by the world's lists, then cross-examined by our own logbook — how many times we've actually flown them, on what metal, and how far.

Departures are now boarding.