Alaska Airlines tops annual Airline Quality Rating report

Alaska Airlines, which launches service this week in Wichita, was named the No. 1 airline in the 2017 Airline Quality Rating.

The AQR ranking, released Monday, rated Alaska tops among the nation’s 12 biggest airlines. The ranking comes as Alaska is in the early stages of absorbing Virgin America, the top airline in last year’s AQR.

Alaska also jumped four spots from its 2016 ranking as the No. 5 carrier.

“These results provide a rare insight into the airline merger arena,” said study co-author Brent Bowen, dean of the College of Aviation at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Ariz.

“We have a carrier, Alaska, that wanted to improve performance, began improvement plans before any merger announcement and is currently taking over the top performer, Virgin America. Going from fifth to first is rare, but a devoted corporate resolve can make that happen.”

Alaska will begin a daily flight from Wichita Eisenhower National Airport to its hub at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport on Thursday.

The annual report, in its 27th year, is co-authored by Dean Headley, a Wichita State University associate professor of marketing. It bases its findings on a formula and four measures from the federal Transportation Department’s monthly Air Travel Consumer Report: on-time performance, mishandled bags, denied boardings and customer complaints.

Here’s how the other 11 airlines ranked, in order, in the 2017 report: Delta, Virgin America, JetBlue, Hawaiian, Southwest, SkyWest, United, American, ExpressJet, Spirit and Frontier.

Alaska, Delta, American and Spirit all improved in their AQR rankings year over year, while the remaining eight airlines’ rankings stayed the same or fell.

The industry as a whole made strides in on-time performance and had fewer mishandled bags, denied boardings and customer complaints, according to the report.

“The best-ever overall industry AQR score is largely due to best-ever performance in the rate of involuntary denied boardings and the rate of mishandled bags,” Headley said.

This story was originally published April 10, 2017 at 10:19 AM with the headline "Alaska Airlines tops annual Airline Quality Rating report."