Editorial process

Methodology: How We Source and Verify Airline Data

Editorial policy~6 min read

FlightContactHelp publishes contact information for roughly 180 airlines across eight European-language editions, along with editorial guides on passenger rights. This page documents how we source, verify and maintain the information — what counts as a credible source, what we will and won't publish, and how readers can correct mistakes. The process is designed for accuracy first, completeness second.

What we publish — and what we won't

The directory exists to give travellers a single, current source for contacting airline customer service. We publish four kinds of information:

• Per-airline contact channels: phone numbers (by country, where multiple regional lines exist), official customer-service email or contact-form URL, WhatsApp handle, official website, official social-media support accounts.
• Operational metadata: hub airport, alliance membership, IATA and ICAO codes, founding year, headquarters city, parent company, frequent-flyer programme name.
• Editorial narrative: a per-airline customer-service overview, channel guide, operational context, and recent operational changes.
• Long-form guides: editorial guides on passenger-rights regulation (EU 261, the Montreal Convention, US DOT rules) and on practical channel-strategy topics.

We will not publish:

• Numbers found on aggregator sites, lead-generation pages, or forum posts. These are frequently outdated, premium-rate, or fraudulent.
• "Direct dial" extensions or back-office numbers that aren't intended for public use.
• Personal contact details of named airline employees.
• Estimated or "typical" phone numbers when we cannot verify the specific number to a specific airline.
• Advice that purports to be legal advice. The guides are explicitly informational; for any specific case, readers should consult a qualified legal adviser.

Sources we treat as credible

For airline contact data, our hierarchy of sources is:

1. The airline's own published material: the official customer-service page on the airline's website, the contact information in the booking confirmation, the support page in the airline's mobile app.
2. The airline's official social-media accounts: verified accounts on X / Twitter and Facebook where the airline publishes a service-channel handle or chat URL.
3. The IATA airline operational database: for IATA / ICAO code verification.
4. National civil aviation authority records: for fleet, route certification, and ownership facts.

For editorial content (the long-form guides and the per-airline narrative), we additionally use:

• The text of relevant regulations (Regulation (EC) No 261/2004, the Montreal Convention 1999, US DOT 14 CFR §259) directly from the official EU, ICAO and US government sources.
• CJEU rulings on EU 261 interpretation (e.g. Sturgeon, Wallentin-Hermann, Krusemän, Wegener) from the official Court of Justice case law database.
• Airline press releases and investor communications for major operational announcements.
• IATA and OAG operational statistics for fleet and network data.
• Civil aviation authority enforcement decisions for examples of how regulations are applied in practice.

We do not cite aggregator publications, "best of" lists, or anonymous review sites. We treat industry trade publications (such as Aviation Week, Flight International, and the major airline trade press) as background reading but not as primary citation sources.

The verification process

Each piece of contact data goes through a four-step verification before publication:

1. Source check: we locate the number, email or URL on the airline's own current published material.
2. Channel test: we confirm the channel is operational. For phone numbers, this means a call test (often automated, just to confirm the number rings and routes to a customer-service IVR). For email and contact forms, we confirm the page is live and the form submits.
3. Locale-tagging: we record the country and language the channel is intended for. UK Lufthansa numbers go to the UK locale; German Lufthansa numbers go to the German locale. This avoids the common aggregator mistake of putting a US number on a UK passenger's page.
4. Timestamping: every record carries an internal "last verified" date. The public-facing page does not display this date, but it drives our re-verification cadence.

Re-verification cadence

The directory is re-verified continuously rather than in scheduled batches. There are three triggers:

• Quarterly default: every airline record is reviewed at least once per quarter, regardless of whether anything has been reported. This catches silent retirements of channels (e.g. an airline closing a UK 0345 line in favour of a chatbot, which is rarely announced).
• Reader-reported triggers: when a reader writes to report a number that no longer connects or has changed, we re-verify that specific record within 48 working hours and update or remove it. Reader reports are the most efficient signal we have for catching changes.
• Major operational events: when an airline announces a restructuring, merger, bankruptcy emergence, brand change, or alliance change, we re-verify all of that airline's records and all of the operational metadata (alliance, parent company, hubs) within seven days of the announcement. Recent examples: SAS's transition from Star Alliance to SkyTeam in September 2024, the Korean Air-Asiana merger progressing through 2024-2026, the Lufthansa Group's acquisition of ITA Airways in 2024.

When a record fails verification (the number is disconnected, the URL is dead, the channel has been retired), we remove it. We don't leave dead numbers live on the assumption that the airline might restore them.

How we handle reader-reported errors

Reader corrections are the most important signal we have for keeping the directory accurate. The process:

1. Reader writes to contact@flightcontacthelp.com with the airline name and the channel that failed.
2. We acknowledge within one working day.
3. We re-verify the channel against the airline's current published material. If it's changed, we update. If it's been retired, we remove. If it's still live but the reader experienced a one-off problem, we note it but don't change the record.
4. The corrected record is live within 48 working hours of the original report.
5. We reply to the reader confirming the change.

We don't publish a public corrections log because the per-airline records are dynamic and the corrections happen frequently — a log would be misleading about which records are "stable" vs "recently corrected." If you want to verify a specific record was corrected, ask via the contact page.

Editorial content: guides and airline narrative

The editorial content (the long-form guides and the per-airline narrative sections on the airline pages) goes through a different process because it deals with interpretation rather than verification of facts.

• Long-form guides (EU 261, baggage claims, refunds, customer-service strategy, codeshare flights, missed connections) are reviewed at least quarterly against the underlying regulation. Major regulatory changes (such as the US DOT automatic-refund rule that took effect in October 2024) trigger an out-of-cycle review.
• Per-airline editorial narrative (the customer-service overview, channel guide, recent operational notes) is reviewed annually as a baseline, and out-of-cycle whenever the airline announces a major operational change.
• Recent-changes timeline on each airline page is updated when verifiable operational events occur. We don't add entries for rumour or for unconfirmed press reports.

The editorial team writes from a position of independent observation. We don't claim to have insider information from any airline; where we describe an airline's service character, that description reflects publicly observable patterns — published policies, published wait-time data, the airline's own service-channel choices — not confidential operational data.

Our use of AI tools

The editorial team uses AI tools for first-draft writing, copy editing, and language work across the eight language editions. Every published page is reviewed by a human editor before it goes live.

Where AI tools assist with drafting, the resulting text is checked against primary sources for factual accuracy. Where the AI tool generated a specific claim (a phone number, a regulatory threshold, a date), we cross-check against the regulation or the airline's own published material before publishing. We do not publish AI-generated content unreviewed.

We disclose this because Google's quality-rater guidelines and emerging editorial-standards bodies are appropriately cautious about uncredited AI content on Your-Money-Your-Life (YMYL) topics like passenger rights. Our position: AI is a useful drafting and translation tool that lets a small editorial team cover eight languages, but human editorial judgement remains the final filter.

Editorial independence

FlightContactHelp is not affiliated with any airline. We do not accept fees from airlines for listing them, for prominent placement, or for publishing their contact channels — every airline page is published on identical terms. We do not accept sponsored content or advertorial.

The site is supported by display advertising (Google AdSense). Advertisers and their networks do not have any influence over which airlines we cover, the order they appear, or the content we publish about them. Advertising decisions are made entirely separately from editorial decisions.

If you have a concern about editorial independence in any specific case, write to us via the contact page. We take editorial-independence concerns seriously and will respond in detail.