Would you pay more for a flight with a punctual airline?

Don’t think so, rather you should be awarded compensation if an airline has a poor record. The normal price you pay is for an on time flight. It follows you should pay less if you’re getting less in the form of a late flight.

All other things being equal, then I would rather avoid an airline with poor punctuality ratings even if cheaper.
However I cant remember when I actually had the luxury of a choice of airlines . For me its usually a matter of choosing the best combination of time and departure airport.

For me, the important factor is not how statistically likely the flight is to be on time, but whether the airline has the infrastructure to put things right in the event of a delay. A larger airline with more redundancy in its fleet will be able to cope better in the event of a problem.

For this reason, I always fly on British Airways if they fly the route I need. However, they once let me down when inferior airlines would not have done. One day when flying from Heathrow to Gibraltar, all flights were diverted to Malaga because of fog in Gibraltar. While Monarch and Easyjet managed to take off again from Malaga and get their passengers to Gibraltar with only a small delay, British Airways sought fit to transport all their passengers by coach to Gibraltar which took several hours in total. I was not impressed. I never found out the cause of this bad treatment, although they did compensate me for out-of-pocket expenses.

Absolutely agree with Chris. When more people become aware of their rights and start to complain effectively and airlines are losing money paying out compensation perhaps they will get their act together and use the money for infrastructure and service and not have to use it on pay outs.

I have not had to claim but I claimed for friends a while back and Thomas Cook rejected the claim stating technical fault. I wrote again informing them that the Jet2 vs Huzar 2014 and the Wallentin_ Hemann vs Alitalia 2009 cases confirmed that technical difficulties are not extraordinary circumstances. My friends got their money! Just shows that even when you are right that companies will still try and fob you off.

I choose to fly Ryanair – I use them for at least 4 return trips a year and in almost all cases they have been on time or ahead of schedule. It seems to be a hobby for some people to moan about Ryanair, but the likes of Ryanair and easyJet have done a huge service to both price and punctuality of short haul flights. In answer to your question, I wouldn’t pay more to go with an airline with a better punctuality record for short haul flights; but like some other correspondents, I choose British Airways for long haul flights, even though others may be cheaper.

The interesting thing about transport punctuality is that you can’t ‘average’ the figures by departing early. You have to have a very high ratio of on-time departures to offset any serious delays and that’s when the ‘not our fault’ excuses start to flow.

Ed has suggested that choosing a punctual airport is the best way to avoid delays. Most people are not prepared to travel for an extra hour to avoid the risk of a fifteen minute delay. In any case, with packaged holidays there is rarely much choice – and some of the second division airports only have one or two flights a week to popular destinations and none at all to others. For optimum flexibility of date, departure time, destination and duration you are usually better off using one of the major airports.

We also need statutory compensation for delayed baggage so that airlines do everything possible to prevent a delay. If airlines had to fork out €100 for every delayed bag (plus consequential emergency purchases), then they would put more resources into getting passengers’ baggage on to the correct flights.