HUNGARIAN no-frills airline Wizz Air was declared Britain's most-delayed carrier on the basis of Civil Aviation Authority data last month.

Perhaps more surprising, however, was fellow budget carriers Easyjet and Ryanair beating a host of flag carriers when it came to punctuality at British airports last year.

So in the battle of budget, who is performing best in consumers' eyes this summer? Well, it's been a tough season for all airlines - and that's reflected in the consumer data we've collected for these three brands in our brand tracking tool, BrandIndex.

Ryanair struggles to impress consumers at the best of times, and even its recent punctuality record hasn't changed that. Its brand health metric, Index (made up of its daily Impression, Value, Quality, Satisfaction and Recommend scores), has tracked consistently in the minus figures over the last quarter and shows only modest signs of improvement as the airport experience settles down.

Competitor Easyjet was the only airline of the three to begin the quarter with a positive Index score but the brand took a hit as trips were cancelled and delays built up (one of our recent polls showed that more than one in two travellers have flight faced delays this year). Its Index score hasn't exactly dive-bombed but it has descended gently from a height of 3.3 at the start of the quarter to 2.8 by its end - all via a significant dip in June.

Sandwiched between these two better known budget brands is our least punctual - Wizz Air. Its brand health score has fallen off by 3.7 points over the last quarter, placing it more firmly in negative territory.

The summer delays won't have helped any of these brands - but of the three, it's Ryanair and Wizz Air who face longer-term perception issues. Easyjet will be hoping that, with capacity issues on their way to being dealt with, cheap can also mean cheerful once more.

(c) 2022 City A.M., source Newspaper