I agree there are many awards but disagree that Skytrax has little impact.

1.When airlines advertise all they want about a certain award, consumers notice the award, and an advertised award like Skytrax is gaining more and more attention. Malaysia Airlines devotes entire pages on its website to Skytrax, and Cathay Pacific splashed out full page advertisements, centrefolds, last year (for example, in Wall Street Journal).

2.Especially in this case when Skytrax is portraying itself as a people's choice award using millions of surveys to come up with the ranking.

3.Newspapers are consistently quoting Skytrax as the ranking, in the way they haven't quoted the likes of Conde Nast.

4.Blogging activity on Skytrax is significant. Google trends show searches on Skytrax are especially popular in Asia, where the high ranking airlines have come from (Cathay, Singapore, Malaysia, Thai)

5.Perhaps airlines rankings do have less impact in the States.

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