Prospective travelers will be pleased to hear that not onlyare there plenty of cheaptravel options including cheap airplane tickets, discount hotel rooms, and cheap vacation packages, but thatU.S. domestic airlines are flying more on time, losing fewer bags, and theircustomers are complaining less often.
These are the findings of an annual report on airlinequality recently released by researchers at Wichita State University andEmbry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Theyhave been competing this report for over 25 years, making it useful forcomparing airlines.
Their findings were based on information compiled by theU.S. Department of Transportation to rate airlines for on-time performance,baggage handling, bumping passengers off oversold flights, and complaints filedwith the government.
The reports general observations included:
Thepercent of flights that arrived on time or close enough rose to 81.4 percent in2016 vs. 79.9 percent in 2015. Of the 12largest U.S. airlines, only American, JetBlue, and Virgin America performedworse. The Transportation Departmentcounts a flight as being on time if it arrives up to 14 minutes late.
Therate of bags being lost, stolen, or delayed fell by 17 percent.
Thefrequency of which passengers were bumped off flights fell by 18 percent, whichdoes not include passengers who voluntarily gave up their seats for money or atravel voucher.
Therate of complaints filed with the government fell by about one-fifth, withcomplaints rising only for Hawaiian and Virgin America. The official complaint rates do not includethe larger number of complaints that passengers file directly withairlines. Airlines are not required toreport those figures.
Some travel experts are critical of a statistical analysisof government data pointing out that such data does not take into considerationhow customers are treated. This datadoes not answer questions such as:
Howcomfortable passengers are on planes?
Howhelpful is the staff?
Whatis the value for what the customer paid?
TripAdvisor recently release its own airline rankings basedon its analysis of hundreds of thousands of reviews posed by users. JetBlue and Alaska Airlines were rated amongthe top 10 in the world, and Delta was rated ahead of American and United amongthe biggest U.S. airlines.
Recently American Airlines placed stickers on all 968 ofits planes touting that a trade publication, Air Transport World, named itairline of the year.
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