Sometimes, you fly in luxury.

The rest of the time, you cram into undersized seats and count the minutes until you arrive at your destination, having saved a few bucks on a budget airline.

When it comes to the latter, it’s worth having a look at Consulta’s latest South African Customer Satisfaction Index (SA-csi), which focuses on the best low-cost, domestic airlines in South Africa.

As you may have guessed from the headline, the index, which sampled 1 025 customers of the country’s five biggest airlines (British Airways (Comair), FlySafair, Kulula, Mango and South African Airways), makes good reading for FlySafair.

Over to BusinessTech:

The data shows that FlySafair leads the ranking, with 78 points out of 100, followed by British Airways (Comair) which scored 75.7, and Kulula Airlines which reached 74.4.

Mango scored on par with the industry average with 74 points, while South African Airways (SAA) lagged behind with 68.8 and well below the industry par of 72.4.

This infographic, also from BusinessTech, does a good job of summarising the SA-csi findings:

Perhaps part of the reason why South Africans are so gatvol with SAA boils down to the fact that the company is hoovering up taxpayer money in a series of bailouts.

Since June 2017 alone, SAA has received close to R16 billion in government bailouts, a figure that excludes the R9,2 billion that Tito Mboweni announced would be needed recently to settle debt repayments.

I may mention these figures next time I’m trying to score an upgrade. Wish me luck.

[source:businesstech]