Richard HallAirlines are actually quite brilliant at emailing us. Booking confirmations, check-in reminders, baggage offers and seat upgrades arrive without much trouble.
But when you, the passenger, email an airline asking for help, it’s often quite a different story.
Sources for all research, publications and announcements are located further down this article
We’ve been digging through Which?’s airline customer-service research because buried beneath the familiar complaints about telephone queues is a simpler problem. Passengers send emails and some airlines simply don’t answer properly.
Sometimes the reply is slow. Sometimes it’s no help. And, remarkably for companies capable of running enormously sophisticated digital booking systems, sometimes customers say they don’t receive an email reply at all.
The latest Which? airline customer-service research we found suggests the wider problem hasn’t gone away, even though things have improved. And when we went backwards through its research, the email figures became much worse.
Half of BA customers reported a problem
In February 2025, Which?, the UK consumer organisation, published research based on 1,667 people who’d contacted an airline with a query or problem during the previous 12 months.
It found 39% had experienced at least one customer-service problem. British Airways was considerably worse: 50% of BA customers surveyed said they’d encountered at least one problem when contacting the airline.
Among those BA customers experiencing problems, 18% reported “long delays in receiving an email response”, while 16% said they’d been passed between departments without receiving a helpful answer.
One 87-year-old BA customer described reaching a human through the airline’s chatbot, starting a conversation, then apparently losing them. He asked three times whether they were still there. Nothing came back.
Go back a year and email looks worse
The February 2025 figures caught our attention because Which? had conducted similar research previously. Its May 2024 findings provide a much clearer picture of just how badly airline email contact could work.
Which? surveyed 1,852 people who’d contacted an airline during the previous 12 months. Overall, 41% reported at least one customer-service problem, rising sharply at several of Britain’s best-known airlines.
Wizz Air came bottom. Among customers contacting it, 57% reported a problem. The equivalent figures were 49% at Ryanair and 48% at British Airways.
Then Which? asked the customers experiencing problems what had actually gone wrong. This is where the research becomes particularly interesting to us, because email response itself emerges as a substantial part of the problem.
Wizz Air: 44% reported long email delays
Among Wizz Air customers who’d experienced customer-service problems, 44% reported “long delays in receiving a response to email”. That’s getting remarkably close to half of those customers experiencing trouble.
Even more strikingly, 21% reported “no response to email.” They weren’t complaining that the answer was poor or arrived later than expected. According to their responses to Which?, an answer simply didn’t arrive.
Wizz Air’s problems weren’t confined to email. Among customers reporting difficulties, 44% encountered an unhelpful or dismissive adviser and 31% experienced long waits before somebody answered the telephone.
But the email numbers matter because email is supposed to remove the problem of waiting on hold. You write down what’s wrong, send it, and the company can deal with it.
BA and Ryanair had email trouble too
Wizz Air wasn’t an isolated case. Among British Airways customers who’d experienced customer-service problems, 27% reported a lack of timely email responses, according to the same May 2024 Which? research.
At Ryanair, 25% of customers experiencing problems reported delayed email responses. Nearly one customer in three also reported long telephone waits, while 23% struggled to reach customer service despite repeated attempts.
Those percentages don’t represent every passenger flying with those airlines. They’re percentages of customers who’d contacted the airline and reported experiencing customer-service problems, which is an important distinction when interpreting the figures.
But plenty of customers were reporting problems in the first place: 57% at Wizz Air, 49% at Ryanair and 48% at BA. Email response was then repeatedly among the difficulties.
Which? tried contacting the airlines itself
There’s another reason these figures deserve attention. Which? didn’t simply survey passengers. In research published in July 2024, its own researchers tried contacting eight major airlines through their available customer-service channels.
They posed as ordinary customers and asked straightforward questions, including whether a passport was valid for European travel and how somebody could correct a spelling mistake on an existing booking.
When researchers used email, Which? reported that British Airways, Vueling and Wizz Air either “failed to respond to emails or replied without providing the requested information.”
Other airlines showed that written customer service could work perfectly well. EasyJet responded on all three occasions it was tested and Which? found the answers helpful in most cases.
TUI’s online enquiry form and KLM’s WhatsApp service also provided helpful responses on all three occasions, so customers getting useful written answers clearly wasn’t some impossibly high standard for the industry.
Some passengers waited 90 days and heard nothing
An earlier Which? airline survey, published in January 2024, produced perhaps the most extraordinary email figure of all. Eleven per cent of people using email received no response within 90 days.
Think about what 90 days means when somebody has a problem with a flight. You could email an airline in January, wait through February and March, and enter April without an answer.
That’s well beyond the ordinary argument about whether a reasonable email response should take two hours, two days or perhaps even a week. After three months, the communication channel has effectively failed.
And unlike sitting in a telephone queue, email gives customers very little information about what’s happening. Their message has gone somewhere, but they can’t necessarily tell whether anybody is actually dealing with it.
Airlines certainly know how to send emails
This is what makes the findings so difficult to excuse as some unavoidable limitation of airline technology. Modern airlines run extraordinarily sophisticated digital operations and communicate electronically with millions of passengers.
They know who booked the flight, where the passenger is going, when they’re travelling, whether they’ve checked in and, quite often, exactly which seat they’ll be sitting in.
They can send confirmations, boarding information, check-in reminders and offers for bags, seats, hotels and car hire. When an airline wants to get something into a customer’s inbox, the machinery works.
The problem uncovered by Which? appears when some customers need that communication to work in the opposite direction, and the email suddenly requires somebody inside the organisation to provide a useful answer.
Replying is only the beginning
There’s another important distinction in the Which? findings. Customer responsiveness isn’t simply divided into companies that reply and companies that don’t. A reply can arrive and still leave the customer stranded.
Which?’s researchers encountered exactly that problem themselves: some airlines either didn’t respond or responded without supplying the information requested. From the customer’s perspective, both outcomes can leave the original problem unresolved.
This is why measuring whether an organisation technically “responded” can tell us surprisingly little. An acknowledgement, generic answer or response that doesn’t address the question still leaves the customer needing help.
And when the customer then has to email again, phone, try the chatbot or start explaining everything to somebody else, the work created by that poor response gets handed straight back to them.
The newer research shows the problem persisted
The February 2025 Which? research suggests airline customer service had improved since its previous investigation. The proportion of customers reporting problems fell from 41% to 39%, although that’s hardly a transformation.
Email delays were still visible. Across the airlines surveyed, 13% reported long waits for an email response, while 12% said they’d been passed between departments without receiving a helpful answer.
British Airways remained particularly troublesome in the survey, with half of customers reporting at least one problem and 18% of those experiencing problems reporting long delays getting an email response.
Which? therefore gives us several years of evidence pointing in the same direction: no reply, slow reply and replies that don’t actually provide the information the customer asked for.
The email address isn’t the service
There’s a wider problem here that goes beyond airlines. Companies increasingly point customers towards digital contact because it’s supposedly convenient, efficient and available without spending half an afternoon listening to hold music.
That only works when somebody responds. An email address on a contact page may make a company look reachable, but customers discover whether it really is only after pressing send.
Airlines provide a particularly stark example because their digital systems are so extraordinarily capable when selling and managing travel. Which?’s research shows how differently things can work when a passenger needs help.
An airline doesn’t become responsive because its website successfully accepts a message, or because an email reaches its servers. The useful bit starts when somebody actually deals with what the customer asked.
And when passengers report waiting weeks, receiving answers that don’t help, or reaching 90 days without any answer, calling email a customer-service channel starts to feel rather generous.
Sources section below
Sources
Sources and relevant reading
Sources for “Took You Seconds To Book That Flight? Now Wait Months For An Answer”
1. Which? Airline companies’ customer service: Who is failing consumers?
Where this source appears in the article:
“Half of BA customers reported a problem” and “The newer research shows the problem persisted.”
Relevant passages in the source:
Which? reports that 39% of adults who contacted an airline experienced at least one customer-service problem. It says 13% waited a long time for an email response. For British Airways specifically, half of customers experienced at least one problem; 18% experienced long email-response delays and 16% were passed between departments without a helpful response. It also recounts the experience of an 87-year-old customer whose conversation with a human agent apparently stopped without a reply. Which?
Where to find them in the source:
See “Airlines’ customer service has improved in the last six months but problems persist”, particularly the paragraphs accompanying the customer-service problems data; then “Wizz Air are the worst large airline for customer service, followed by British Airways and Ryanair”, particularly the British Airways section. The methodology appears at the end of the article.
2. Which? Airlines: Where is customer service going wrong?
Where this source appears in the article:
“Go back a year and email looks worse”, “Wizz Air: 44% reported long email delays”, and “BA and Ryanair had email trouble too.”
Relevant passages in the source:
Which? reports that 41% of people who had contacted an airline experienced at least one customer-service problem. At airline level, the figures were 57% for Wizz Air, 49% for Ryanair and 48% for British Airways. It reports delayed email responses among Ryanair customers experiencing problems at 25%, and lack of timely email responses among equivalent British Airways customers at 27%. The source also identifies difficulties reaching customer service and long telephone waits. Which?
Where to find them in the source:
See “Airlines sits third from bottom for poor customer service” and, especially, “Around half of people who contacted British Airways, Ryanair and Wizz Air reported 1 or more customer service problems.” The survey methodology and base sizes are provided under “Methodology.”
Important source note:
The published Which? webpage currently available supports the article’s 57%, 49%, 48%, 27% and 25% figures. However, I could not locate the article’s specific claims that 44% of Wizz Air customers experiencing problems reported long email delays and 21% reported no email response in the accessible text of this source. Those two figures should therefore be checked against the original underlying Which? data/chart before publication.
3. Which? Investigation exposes emails unanswered and phone calls cut off as airlines fall short on customer service
Where this source appears in the article:
“Which? tried contacting the airlines itself” and “Replying is only the beginning.”
Relevant passages in the source:
Which? says its researchers contacted eight major airlines through channels including phone, online chat, email or alternatives, and social media. Researchers made simple requests such as correcting a spelling mistake or asking about passport validity. For email, British Airways, Vueling and Wizz Air either did not reply or failed to provide useful information. EasyJet replied every time and was generally helpful; TUI’s online form and KLM’s WhatsApp service were also effective. Which?
Where to find them in the source:
The key methodology is near the beginning of the article, starting “Which? researchers contacted eight major airlines…” The email findings are in the paragraph beginning “For non-urgent queries, email contact also proved difficult…” Notes to editors confirm that the contacts were made in April 2024.
4. Which? Shabby service and delay complaints as Wizz Air takes bottom spot in Which? airline survey for second year running
Where this source appears in the article:
“Some passengers waited 90 days and heard nothing.”
Relevant passages in the source:
Which? reports that many respondents had difficulty getting customer support and that 11% of those who used email to contact an airline received no response within 90 days. The survey covered passengers’ experiences of flying during the preceding year and analysed responses relating to more than 10,000 flights. Which?
Where to find them in the source:
The 90-day email finding appears near the beginning, in the paragraph starting “However, Which? research suggests…” The survey details appear under “Notes to editors”, which states that Which? surveyed its online panel in October 2023 and received responses covering 10,775 flights.
This Footnote Zone uses NokNok’s diagnostic toolkit to examine how the responsiveness failures and inaccessible service journeys described in this article can be identified, measured, and addressed.
- Email Finder: Identifies the friction of user requests existing simultaneously in form databases without accountable human contact options, and scans an organization’s website and related public-facing materials for published email addresses, then reports on structural deficiencies, discrepancies, missing contact routes, or other contactability gaps.
- Reply Radar: Targets the failure of service teams to meet response deadlines and manage human queues, such as the dyslexic claimant whose promised contact never came for fourteen months, and deploys targeted test emails and quantitatively measures reply rates, latency, response consistency, and related responsiveness benchmarks.
- Compliance Sniffer: Addresses the unreliability of current automation agents, including grounding errors and failures to meet legal service outcome expectations, and analyzes incoming responses for objective quality, clarity, relevance, escalation, and compliance benchmarks.
- Mystery Shopper: Audits the complete service journey from first contact through response, adaptation, action, and recovery to prevent systemic end-to-end contact failures, and executes a comprehensive end-to-end responsiveness UX audit, testing how a real user experiences the organization’s contact, response, and escalation pathways.
Disclosure: The diagnostic tools referenced in this Footnote Zone were developed by NokNok, a specialist in online responsiveness tool design. ReplyResearch may use NokNok tools, resources, or analysis when preparing coverage, while retaining responsibility for its editorial decisions, including what topics to cover, what sources to cite, and how stories are presented. Read the full ReplyResearch Collaborative Disclosure Policy here.
