Qatar Airways is ranked as the number one airline and Hamad International in Doha the world’s best airport.
But UK carriers and airports get mixed results in a new study with Virgin Atlantic in 10th place, Flybe 14th, British Airways 21st and easyJet coming fourth bottom out of 72.
Ryanair fared only marginally better coming in at two places higher. Jet2 came marginally outside the bottom ten carriers in the world in 61st place while Thomas Cook Airlines was just outside the bottom 20 in 51st place
Icelandic low fares carrier Wow Air came bottom of the airline rankings, just behind Royal Jordanian Airlines.
The UK has four airports ranked among the poorest 20 in the world, with Stansted the worst performer, ranked second bottom in a global list of 141 airports, driven largely by poor Twitter sentiment.
By this metric, Gatwick was the worst performing airport globally, although it was ranked marginally higher than Stansted overall in 123st position.
Sandwiched between these two airports were Edinburgh in 131st place and Manchester 136th, both of which also received poor scores for Twitter sentiment.
The study was carried out by AirHelp, a company that assists passengers with compensation claims for delayed, cancelled or overbooked flights.
It ranked 72 airlines and 141 airports based on on-time performance and quality of service, as well as Twitter sentiment.
AirHelp CEO and co-founder Henrik Zillmer said: “For some time now UK airports have seemingly been in the news for all the wrong reasons and that has been realised in this data.
“The UK is enviably positioned when it comes to physical movement of people globally, but this report needs to serve as a wake-up call when it comes to actual performance.
“Passengers are clearly not happy and while it will be a challenge to address the issues highlighted in this report, it is also an opportunity to halt the decline in performance and provide consumers with a better experience.”
He added: “Of course, things go wrong – and consumers understand this – but it’s how these companies recognise and handle the unexpected that is remembered, particularly when it comes to claims processing as disgruntled passengers understandably want what they are rightly owed.”
Lufthansa was ranked the second best airline followed by Etihad Airways, Singapore Airlines, South African Airways, Austrian Airlines, Aegean Airlines, Qantas, Air Malta and Virgin Atlantic.
The worst rated airport was Kuwait, just below Stansted, Lyon, Paris Orly, Stockholm Bromma and Manchester.
The top ranked airport after Doha were Athens, Haneda in Tokyo, Cologne/Bonn, Singapore Changi, Chubu Centrair in Nagoya, Japan; Viracopos in Sao Paulo; Amman in Jordan; Recife in Brazil and Mariscal Sucre in Quito, Equador.
An easyJet spokesman told MailOnline Travel: “We absolutely do not recognise these findings. EasyJet takes its responsibilities under Regulation (EC) No 261/2004 extremely seriously and will always pay compensation when it is due.
“We offer simple webforms easily found on our website and are currently processing valid claims in less than 21 days. We have plans to further improve this payment processing time later this year.
“We want to make it as easy as possible for our passengers to claim with us directly rather than sacrificing a significant portion of their compensation to other organisations like AirHelp unnecessarily.”
A spokesman for Edinburgh airport said: “Another year and yet more bogus findings which serve to do nothing more than generate PR for a compensation firm. It’s factually inaccurate and uses a convoluted formula which doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
“We regularly hear from our passengers and airlines about how we’re performing and we’ll continue to work hard at providing the best service we can, correctly measuring our performance and listening to make sure we improve where we can.”
A Stansted spokesman said: “Stansted is the fastest growing London airport with passengers voting with their feet in record numbers – we will serve 29 million passengers this year – and is investing significant sums of money to ensure that our passengers are provided with the high levels of customer experience that they are entitled to.
“However, as with their previous PR initiatives, this latest survey from AirHelp is purely a self-serving exercise based on very little or no substantive evidence and designed to promote a company seeking to take a share of flight compensation claims.”