British Airways' advertisements used to style it "the world's favorite airline", but now the crisis-hit carrier is not even close to being the nation's favorite, a poll of air travelers showed Saturday.

The British flag carrier, which was forced to cancel dozens of flights this week due to technical problems and staff shortages, was rated consistently worse than rival Virgin Atlantic in a poll conducted for the Daily Telegraph.

Of 4,200-plus people asked, BA scored worse than Virgin in areas such as the cleanliness of its aircraft and courtesy of staff, and was also rated as bad as budget carriers airlines easyJet and Ryanair for punctuality, comfort and baggage handling, among others.

BA was forced to cancel a string of flights last week to and from London's Heathrow Airport after technical problems triggered a series of severe delays, exacerbated by low staffing levels.

The airline called off a total of 88 flights, just ahead of Britain's end-of-August three-day weekend, traditionally one of the busiest periods of the year for air travel.

The poll, in which respondents only rated airlines they had flown on, showed BA lagging some way behind Virgin in terms of overall customer satisfaction.

In all, 73% of those who had flown Virgin rated the overall experience as good or excellent, against an equivalent figure of 61% for BA, slightly above easyJet's 51% and 49% for Ryanair.

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