New airline rankings on customer service

Posted by: Dean Foust on June 30

J.D. Power and Associates released its latest “customer satisfaction” rankings of the major airlines, and the big headline is: Airline passengers are getting to their destination quicker, but are increasingly dissatisfied with the quality of service. The best performers in the survey: Alaska Airlines and JetBlue, with WestJet charging hard on the rail. Dragging up the rear: United, U.S. Airways, AirTran and Frontier.

J.D. Power (which like BusinessWeek, is owned by The McGraw-Hill Cos.) found overall customer satisfaction dipped for the third straight year, and to the lowest point since 2005. The nearly 13,000 fliers that Power polled were dissatisfied with in-flight services, flight crew, cost, fees, the fat guy who snores in the next seat, the amount of salt on the peanuts, and the fact that there was a flight attendant on that return trip from Reno who wouldn’t give them the whole can of Coke (okay, I made up those last three things).

The good news: The customer-reported length of flight delays was down by eight minutes, to an average 72 minutes. And average wait times at the ticketing/baggage check counter dipped from 14 minutes to 12 minutes over the past year. So flying stunk, but stunk less, I guess.

One interesting nugget in the survey: Noting that government statistics showed the overall rate of on-time arrivals was up by more than five percentage points from 2008—to 78% so far this year—Power analyzed the data and concluded that 70% of the improvement came from issues within the airlines’ control, rather than external issues like bad weather, security issues or air traffic control.

As for the performance of the individual airlines, J.D. Power gave highest marks to:

TRADITIONAL, FULL-SERVICE CARRIERS: