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If you flew from Mallorca this summer felt like it took forever to actually leave the ground, the data backs you up.

 

Palma de Mallorca airport recorded the worst punctuality of any major airport in Spain between June 1 and August 31, with just 60.5% of flights departing on time according to figures from the international platform AirHelp. A separate Eurocontrol report puts the picture in even starker terms, placing Palma third worst in all of Europe among major airports, behind only Zurich and Lisbon, with just 53% of departures on schedule and 7% of flights cancelled outright.

 

The reasons aren't hard to find. Palma's control centre broke its own all-time record for daily traffic this summer, and Spain as a whole accounted for 17% of all flight route delays across the entire European network. Eurocontrol points to a combination of capacity problems, controller shortages and rapid traffic growth, with the average delay per flight route in Spain rising 14% on the same period in 2025.

 

Manchester and Athens also featured among Europe's five worst airports for punctuality, alongside Palma, Lisbon and Zurich. Reus and Ibiza also struggled domestically, with punctuality of 65.7% and 65.8% respectively, the three worst-performing airports in Spain all sharing the same problem: more tourists than the system can comfortably handle.

 

It's worth noting that even these figures represent an improvement on the first half of the year, when Spanish on-time performance plummeted to just 63.3%, fifteen points below the 79.1% recorded in the same period of 2025. Cold comfort if you spent three hours waiting at a gate, but at least the direction of travel is upward.

 

At the other end of the scale sits a name that will draw a blank for most people. El Hierro, a tiny airport on Spain's westernmost island with a runway just 1,250 metres long that can only handle turboprop aircraft (smaller propeller-driven planes rather than standard jets), topped the national rankings with 87.5% punctuality. Its secret is simple: it only connects to Tenerife North and Gran Canaria, serves two small regional airlines on flights of under an hour, and handled 88 flights over the last weekend of August.

 

Madrid-Barajas handled nearly 5,000 in the same period. Scale, it turns out, is the enemy of punctuality. Asturias came second nationally at 86.6%, with Santiago de Compostela third at 82.9%.

 

Madrid-Barajas finished the summer at 75.3% punctuality and Barcelona-El Prat at 70%, both middling by comparison with Europe's best. Stockholm-Arlanda led the continent at 82%, followed by Oslo and Istanbul at 81%.

 

Across Spain as a whole, one in four flights this summer, 26.6% of the total, suffered some form of delay or cancellation, affecting more than 49.2 million passengers. AirHelp estimates that around 561,000 of those passengers may be entitled to financial compensation under European regulations, while the additional costs borne by travellers for accommodation, alternative transport and missed reservations that don't qualify for compensation totalled an estimated €502.3 million.

 

If your summer flight was among the disrupted ones, it's worth checking what you might be owed. And if you're looking for a stress-free getaway next year, El Hierro is apparently very reliable, as long as you don't mind a turboprop and a very short runway.

 

Image: wikicommons