Seems everyone these days seems to be in the “best of” business, busily ranking just about everything that touches our lives – airlines among them.
One of the most highly-coveted rankings is the annual AQR – the Airline Quality Rating produced by professors at Wichita State and Purdue University. This year discount airline AirTran takes the top prize, this after two years of second-place finishes in the AQR.
Other notable news from the latest rankings: Alaska Airlines, the carrier with the smiling Eskimo on the tail, vaulted several spots. 2009 performance showed the carrier ranked 11th best. In 2010 figures it was fourth.
Megacarrier Delta Air Lines didn’t fare shabbily either. 2009 AQR data ranked it a distant 15th. In 2010 it was seventh best. Meanwhile, discount airlines JetBlue and Southwest maintained their third- and fifth-best rankings respectively.
More high (and low) lights. Hawaiian Airlines was the best on-time performer in 2010. An extraordinary 92.5 percent of the carrier’s flights were on time. Comair, which operates some Delta Connection flights, racked up the worst on-time record. Just 73.1 percent of the regional airline’s flights were on time.
More insight: JetBlue had the lowest involuntary denied boardings (bumping in popular parlance). Just 0.01 instances per 10,000 passengers. On the other end of the bumping spectrum was American Eagle. The AQR says 4.02 per 10,000 of its passengers were involuntarily denied boarding.
As for luggage issues, AirTran had the best baggage record: 1.63 mishandled pieces of luggage for every 1,000 passengers. American Eagle was on the short end of this measuring stick, with 7.15 mishandled bags per 1,000 flyers.
In the all-important consumer complaint category Southwest continued to soar. The discount airline had an enviable complaint rate of 0.27 per 1000,000 passengers. Delta had the worst record among U.S. airlines: 2.00 consumer complaints for every 100,000 flyers.
Here are AQR’s overall rankings, based on 2010 performance:
1 – AirTran
2 – Hawaiian
3 – JetBlue
4 – Alaska
5 – Southwest
6 – US Airways
7 – Delta
8 – Continental
9 – Frontier
10 – SkyWest
11 – American
12 – United
13 – Mesa
14 – Comair
15- Atlantic Southeast
16 – American Eagle
Some key takeaways derived from the figures: “As the system adjusts to higher demand for air travel, more things are not going to go as planned for travelers,” asserts Dean Headley, associate professor of marketing at the Wichita State University’s W. Frank Barton School of Business.
Mergers have made waves over the past several years in the airline industry, getting a few passengers wet in the process. “Further airline consolidation will continue to reduce the number of air carriers in the AQR,” says professor Brent Bowen, head of Perdue University’s Department of Aviation Technology.
“Past AQR data suggests that the combining of two large air carrier operations often results in subsequent decreases ion AQR rankings. We will be carefully watching to see if two high-rate carriers, such as [number one] AirTran and [number five] Southwest, will reverse the trend.”
The Airline Quality Rating is perhaps the most intellectually rigorous of all ranking venues out there. Its bills itself as “the nation’s most comprehensive study of airline performance and quality.”
Story by Jerry Chandler
(Image: westlingk)
