8 Out Of The Top 10 Cleanest Airlines Are Based In Asia

Simple Flying

By Nicholas Cummins

Published Mar 19, 2019

Recently, American Airlines started a new short-haul policy of not cleaning their planes in between legs to ensure that their planes leave on time. These faster turn arounds would reduce time on the ground and boost time in the air, leading to more profit for the company.

The problem is, of course, dirty planes.

As such you can bet that American Airlines doesn't make the new Skytrax ranking of cleanest airlines in the world. In fact, eight of the top ten are from Asia...

American Airlines is known for a subpar on time performance. Photo: American Airlines

What are the details?

Skytrax took the ratings left by thousands of passenger reviews and was able to rank all modern airlines in terms of cleanliness. And by cleanliness, we mean how clean the seats, tray tables, finishes, carpets, wall panels, bathrooms and more are. Details such as crumbs in seat cracks were especially noted (An author's pet peeve!).

Here are the top ten cleanest airlines:

Airline	Country
ANA All Nippon Airways	Japan
EVA Air	Taiwan
Asiana Airlines	South Korea
Singapore Airlines	Singapore
Japan Airlines	Japan
Cathay Pacific Airlines	Hong Kong
Qatar Airways	Qatar
Swiss International Air Lines	Switzerland
Hainan Airlines	China
Lufthansa	Germany

The full list can be checked out here.

The winners and losers

If you have been to Japan (known for its lack of trash cans because they don't need them), it will come as no surprise that a Japanese airline is number one. ANA is well known for its high-quality service and seat product, we cannot wait to see how they operate their new A380 in the coming months.

Singapore Airlines, which won the Skytrax Best Airline of 2018, only came in at number four on this list (proving that even though they are best, they have room to improve!).

The first non-Asian airline is Qatar at number seven. The extra effort that Qatar has put into their soft product is starting to show. Hot on their heels are Swiss Air, who it appears have incorporated hoovering into their military like turnaround precision.

Surprisingly, Lufthansa rounds off the list at number 10. For such a large airline with so many planes flying (288 in their fleet so far, with a brand new 777x soon to be delivered) its nothing short of a miracle that they can maintain such a high standard.

Another European airline, British Airways, is not present high on the list. They have chosen not to clean their aircraft between intra-Europe flights in order to save money and turn their aircraft around faster. I would hope that they will be cleaning their shiny new A350 when it performs its first European test flights.