Planning to fly in the United States? What is the best airline to fly in America? What airlines you should not fly in the US? How to avoid a bad airline? How to make your flight pleasant?
These are questions most airline passengers ask.
A report with the latest analysis of U.S. government-reported data concerning airlines with the best and worst customer service was released today.
For purposes of this study, available data from November 2018 through August 2019 was used from air travel consumer reports compiled by the U.S. government. The analysis utilized monthly averages as well as per capita data for the 10-month period. Only results for commercial U.S. airlines were tabulated.
Airlines that are often on time? The top 3 U.S. carriers with the best percentage of on-time arrivals were Hawaiian Airlines (86.5%), Delta Air Lines (82.4%) and Endeavor Air (81.9%).
Airlines that are not on time? The carrier with the worst record was ExpressJet (70%), followed by Frontier and JetBlue (both of which have just 72% on-time arrivals).
Airlines that often cancel flights? Express Jets leads in this category (4.7% of their flights were canceled), with Envoy Air (3.8%) and Mesa Airlines (3.1%) close behind.
Airlines that don’t often cancel flights? Delta Airlines has the best record of fewest flights canceled (0.2%), followed by Hawaiian Airlines (0.4%) and Allegiant Air (0.5%).
Airlines with the most mishandled baggage: This study looked at two types of data for diverted, lost, damaged or delayed baggage – the average number of bags mishandled per 1,000 handled and the total number of mishandled bags.
Overall, Envoy Air had the highest average number of bags per 1,000 mishandled (8.7 per 1,000), while Allegiant Air (2.0 per 1,000) and Frontier Airlines (2.9 per 1,000) had the lowest. In terms of the total number of mishandled bags, Southwest Airlines had the worst record (49,191) and second-worst was American Airlines (47,243 mishandled bags).
Customer complaints by airline: This data analysis presented both the total complaints/month per 10,000 passengers as well as the total complaints reported for the 10-month period of November 2018 to August 2019. The results indicated that the airlines with the most complaints involved
- Frontier Airlines, Frontier Airlines (27/10,000 490 total)
- Spirit Airlines (27/10,000 771 total)
- American Airlines (17/10,000 passengers and 1,571 total complaints.
Airlines with fewer complaints?
- Skywest Airlines (5/10,000 passengers and 153 total),
- Endeavor Air (4/10,000 36 total)
- Southwest Airlines (3/10,000 passengers and 473 complaints in total).
Complaint categories and airlines: The final area covered in this data study concerned airline rankings for each type of complaint.
In the area of flight problems, Republic Airways led the group with 87.1% of all complaints registered in that category, 26.8% of all baggage-related issues were reported for Sun Country Airlines, while 22.5% of all issues involving disabled passengers were reported for Allegiant Air.
