Airlines improving the flying experience, report says

The nation’s airlines made strides in on-time performance and had fewer mishandled bags, denied boardings and customer complaints, according to partial findings of a new report.

“They got better in all four areas, and that’s a good thing,” said Dean Headley, associate professor of marketing at Wichita State University and co-author of the Airline Quality Rating.

Full results of the report prepared by Brent Bowen, a Headley and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University professor, will be released Monday. The results will include an overall ranking of the nation’s 12 biggest airlines, from best to worst.

But partial findings from the report show airlines improved as a group in all four categories.

“You would hope they would. They’re making money,” Headley said, adding that airline profit margins in the past two to three years have been between 8 and 12 percent.

The industry improvement suggests that airlines are listening to their customers, Headley said.

“They’re doing a few things to make (flying) nicer again,” he said.

The category showing the most meaningful improvement, Headley said, was mishandled baggage – bags that are lost, damaged, delayed or stolen.

The report, using data from the federal Transportation Department’s monthly Air Travel Consumer Report, said the mishandled baggage rate for the industry dropped to 2.7 mishandled bags per 1,000 passengers in 2016. That compares with 3.24 per 1,000 passengers in 2015.

“The baggage thing is the best it’s ever been,” Headley said.

Nine of the report’s 12 airlines lowered their mishandled baggage rates in 2016.

Also better year over year was involuntary denied boardings, or “bumping” passengers when an airline oversells seats on flights.

The preliminary report shows that denied boardings for the industry fell from 0.76 per 10,000 passengers in 2015 to 0.62 per 10,000 passengers in 2016. In all, seven airlines lowered their denied boardings rate, the report said.

Customer complaints were slightly lower, too, the report said. The rate of complaints – three-quarters of which were over flight problems, baggage, customer service and reservations – edged down from 1.90 per 100,000 passengers in 2015 to 1.52 per 100,000 passengers in 2016, the report said.

And airlines’ on-time performance saw slight improvement in 2016, too. The industry increased on-time performance by about 1 percent between 2015 and 2016, to 81.4 percent. Nine of the 12 airlines in the report also improved their individual on-time performances.

Headley thinks that once the transition to NexGen – the Federal Aviation Administration’s conversion to a satellite-based air traffic control system – is complete, the airline industry will see even more significant improvement in on-time performance.

“To me, that’s the one thing that could change this on-time factor,” he said.

Best and worst

While the preliminary report doesn’t assign an overall ranking for the 12 airlines, it does identify which airline was the best – and worst – in the four categories.

The airlines measured in the report were Alaska, American, Delta, Frontier, Hawaiian, JetBlue, Southwest, Spirit, United and Virgin America. Also included are regional airlines ExpressJet and Sky West, which are “feeder” carriers to major airlines Alaska, American, Delta and United.

Hawaiian had the best on-time performance, at 91 percent, while Spirit had the worst, at 74 percent.

Hawaiian also had the lowest denied boardings rate, 0.05 per 10,000 passengers, while ExpressJet had the highest, 1.51.

ExpressJet also had the highest mishandled baggage rate, 4.31 bags per 1,000 passengers, while Virgin America’s rate of 1.03 was the lowest.

As for the rate of customer complaints, Southwest led with the fewest, at 0.47 per 100,000 passengers, compared with Spirit, which 6.74 was the highest rate.

Individual performances aside, Headley thinks the airline industry is trying to give its customers a better experience than in the past.

“My conclusion … air travel is great again,” he said. “I don’t know if that’s a period, question mark or exclamation point. (But) we’re going in the right direction.”

This story was originally published April 9, 2017 at 4:13 PM with the headline "Airlines improving the flying experience, report says."