There's a moment I've seen play out hundreds of times across the ten years I've spent in customer experience measurement. A leadership team gathers around a dashboard. The NPS number is sitting there. It's okay — not great, not terrible. Someone says "we need to move the needle." The room nods. And then, almost without fail, nobody can agree on why the number is where it is or exactly what to do about it.
This happens in retail, in banking, in healthcare. But nowhere is it more persistent, or more expensive, than in aviation.
The industry that spends the most, measures the least
Airlines invest enormous sums in the customer experience. New aircraft, redesigned cabins, digital check-in, loyalty programs, lounge upgrades. And yet the industry has historically produced some of the weakest customer satisfaction numbers of any consumer-facing sector.
According to Qualtrics data, the airline industry recorded an average NPS of just -1 in 2020. Even by 2025, most major carriers were sitting in the low double digits. Healthcare, retail and technology companies routinely score three to four times higher. The gap isn't about effort. Airlines are trying. The gap is about measurement.
You cannot fix what you do not properly understand.
NPS tells you what, not why
Net Promoter Score is a good metric. I want to be clear about that. It has real value, particularly as a strategic benchmark to track over time and compare against competitors. Finnair's own CX leadership has described NPS as useful for "the view through the experience" and for understanding the big picture of the customer journey. That's accurate.
But here's the problem. Knowing that your NPS dropped three points after the summer season doesn't tell you whether it was the boarding process, the cabin crew, the catering, the app, or the fact that half of your customers were quietly furious about a baggage fee they didn't see coming. NPS is a score. It is not a diagnosis.
As one airline CX director put it: NPS "doesn't give the information on the success" of individual elements. Exactly right. And without that, you are essentially managing the outcome rather than the inputs.
The problem runs deeper than data gaps
Here's what the research says about why customers make decisions. Harvard Business School found that 95% of purchase decisions are emotional. Not rational, not price-driven, not feature-based — emotional. Yet the standard CX toolkit in most airlines, NPS, CSAT, CES, measures loyalty, service quality, and ease of use. All rational constructs.
We are measuring logic in an industry that runs on feeling.
Think about the last time you had a genuinely memorable flight. Or the last time an airline experience left you frustrated enough to complain. What was the driving force? Not the departure time. Not the seat width in centimeters. It was how the whole thing made you feel. Trusted or dismissed. Valued or processed. Excited or exhausted.
That feeling, that emotional state, is the real currency of airline loyalty. And most airlines are not measuring it.
What emotional measurement actually looks like
This is where I'll be direct, because it's the area I've worked in specifically. At Feedbackly, we developed the Emotional Value Index (EVI®), a registered methodology built to measure customer emotion at any touchpoint in the journey.
The data behind it is not soft. Feedbackly's research shows that EVI® has up to an 80% correlation with sales and conversion rates. Customers who feel positive emotions spend up to 40% more compared to those who don't. And crucially, EVI® can be applied pre-purchase, at the booking stage, at the information stage — not just after the flight is done and the moment has passed.
Unlike NPS, which gives you a retrospective loyalty score, EVI® captures emotional state in real time across the journey. You can measure how a passenger feels when they're navigating your website. How they feel at boarding. How they feel after a delay is handled. Each touchpoint becomes a data point — and when you connect those dots, you start to see where you're building loyalty and where you're quietly destroying it.
NPS and emotion together, that's where it gets interesting
I'm not arguing airlines should abandon NPS. I'm arguing they should stop treating it as the whole picture.
The most effective CX measurement frameworks combine structural metrics like NPS and CSAT with emotional experience measurement. NPS tells you where you stand overall. EVI® tells you why — and more importantly, which emotional moments drove you there.
When airlines understand which emotions a delayed flight triggers, and whether their crew response shifts that emotion from frustration to trust, they can actually train for it, design for it, and measure whether it worked. That's actionable. That's the difference between a metric and a tool.
A final thought
The airlines that will lead in customer experience over the next decade will not be the ones with the highest NPS scores this year. They will be the ones who invest in truly understanding what their passengers feel — at every moment of the journey, and who build operations, training and communication around those feelings.
We have the tools to do this now. The methodology exists. The data is there.
The only question is whether you are willing to measure what actually matters.
Jaakko Männistö is a CX professional, growth leader and the developer of EVI® (Emotional Value Index). He has worked with 450+ brands globally on customer experience strategy and measurement. He is the author of "The Journey – How to Create the Happiest Customers in the World."