EVA Air Becomes The 8th Skytrax 5-Star Airline

I don't really pay attention to skytrax either. Having flown Air Koryo, which received 1 star rating, I thought it was certainly better than some of the 2 star and even 3 star rated airlines on skytrax!
As for other five star airlines, I'd put Japan Airlines, Emirates, and Virgin Atlantic up there as well. I've flown each of those airlines in economy, business/upper class, and First and always had a seamless experience from checking-in the airport, boarding, transiting, and arriving.
BTW, what happened to Malaysia Airlines? I'm guessing they got downgraded?
What I wish skytrax did is have a separate star category rating on each class of service (i.e. economy/business/first) as leisure travelers are better off 'trusting' skytrax's ratings based solely on their economy cabin rating rather than the overall that puts business/first class in consideration.

Congrats to EVA! I fly with them constantly, and I think their catering improved significantly in the past couple of months. I heard that they now provide mattress in their long-haul Royal Laurel Class. Will find out if that's true this weekend when I fly them to SFO.

@ Lucky: I believe EVA Air is retiring some of the Hello Kitty aircraft. Probably bad news for you......

I feel that Skytrax is being aimed at the "average" traveler rather than hardcore aviation enthusiast like us. If they see that they are on a official 5 star airline, they would want to fly that airline and probably expect a 5 star meal and 5 star service.

I don't know how Etihad doesn't get a 5 star ranking and yet, they have products that blow even other 5 star carriers away!

The SkyTrax ratings make no sense at all. For example, while Hainan is a five star airline, for trans-pacific travel, Qantas, Air New Zealand, Virgin Australia, Korean Air, JAL, and more all rank higher, even though none of those airlines are "five-star".

Hainan is 10th for TPAC travel. Is their regional flying just so amazing that it makes up for it? No. Hainan paid SkyTrax.

Qatar Airways did the same, I assume, as much as I love Qatar Airways, as they seem to be in the top 10 for every category that applies to them. Qatar Airways has the 6th best first class in the world (according to SkyTrax), and they only have their good first class on 6 planes, flying to very few destinations.

SkyTrax even said that Qatar Airways has the 6th best cabin crew in the world, AND PUT ANA AT 9th! Fools!

I'd like to give Skytrax some credit. In the past I left some harsh comments even for 5* airlines and these were published without any filter. Whether they take advantage I don't know. I recall a spite between Etihad and Skytrax some years back. Etihad was paying for ads and yet couldn't climb the ladder to the point that the airline came out with a statement saying they were pulling off from Skytrax (under the line it meant that they were no longer going to spend money on Skytrax). Skytrax remained on their position which for me it's a good sign of independence. Whether it's only partial well the doubt will always remain, but to some extent this episode proved to me that Skytrax were genuine. So I trust their evaluation pretty much to be honest.

The current Hello Kitty livery on their A330-200 will be retired soon!

I honestly think that Skytrax's ratings are swayed by money. Having Hainan & Garuda in there and not some other airlines just seems off. I'm not knocking Hainan or Garuda, but there are other airlines that should be so called 5 *

To me, any airline with 10 abreast in economy on a 777 shouldn't be considered 5 stars. Qatar should have been downgraded. Although I do find it impressive that they were able to change the configuration to 10 abreast so quietly.

I recently had an excellent flight on EVA. The food has greatly improved from my previous trips - I actually think it approached First Class in quality. Really good selection of movies and great noise cancelling headsets. They started passing out mattress pads for turn down although I used the ultra thick blanket from an adjacent vacant seat as my "mattress pad". It was incredibly comfortable. I look forward to flying them again.

You have to remember that they are considering the complete fleets. Emerites has a handful of awesome business class seats and a bunch of aircraft that are still angled and not true lie flat seats.

Consistency. How could you give five stars to an airline when the majority of guests will not receive that product? You can't, thus the ratings.

Skytrax is wack. EVA is awesome though.

I stopped reading Skytrax after they edited my last review. Skytrax is heavily swayed by their client airlines who win 5-star ratings after purchasing their highest tier consulting services and agree to purchase trophies and other promotional crap to be placed in every office and airport. Whenever an airline boasts about Skytrax, I try to tell them how meaningless it is.

I didn't know until now that skytrax takes money from the airlinea but it certainly makes sense. They rate Heathrow as one of the world's top ten airports. Does anyone who has flown through there really believe that? They give BA, with its old planes, tight seats and outdated IFE 4 stars yet Delta gets only 3. And they gave lufthansa's short hail business class seats 4 stars for comfort. These are economy seats with the middle seats blocked. Are those truly more comfortable than AA, UA or DL short haul business? I think not.

In any event, I flew Eva business and found it underwhelming, especially after the review on here. The lounge was fair, food was pretty bad and the crew, while polite, were nothing compared to Korean, Asiana, Qatar or Qantas. It was also one of the bumpiest flights Ive been on and I for one would have appreciated some reassurance from the cockpit. Not a word.