There’s been enough drama in the past year to impact U.S. airlines quality rankings. An Alaska Airlines blowout grounded dozens of planes. There was a failed JetBlue-Spirit merger and Spirit’s bankruptcy. A summer tech outage crippled Delta. Southwest Airlines faced investor pressure and said it’s switching to assigned seating. All while planes remained packed and air traffic congested.
Delta took the crown again in The Wall Street Journal’s 17th airline scorecard (Jan. 23, 2025), standing out in nearly every category. This is Delta’s 4th consecutive win and 7th in eight years. It prides itself on reliability and customer service—it displays this and other accolades on stickers near its cabin doors—and commands a premium for it. There’s a reason those Delta tickets often cost more. Southwest finished a mere point behind Delta, with Alaska in third. In the ratings cellar? Frontier. Spirit placed 8th and American Airlines finished 7th.
The 9 major U.S. airlines are ranked on 7 equally weighted operations metrics: on-time arrivals, flight cancellations, delays of 45 minutes or more, baggage handling, tarmac delays, involuntary bumping and what the Transportation Department calls passenger submissions (which are mostly complaints).
Delta finished first in on-time arrivals and was the only airline in the ranking to exceed 80%. It canceled far fewer flights than in 2023, giving it the lowest cancellation rate besides Southwest. “It’s a testament to our people, along with the resiliency, reliability and efficiency we’ve purposely built into our operation, that we canceled fewer than 1% of our scheduled flights and improved or held steady in nearly every category,” said Southwest’s COO.
Delta’s weak spot: bag handling. The airline’s mishandled bag rate trailed those of Allegiant, JetBlue, Frontier and Southwest. Frontier, the airline that draws you in with $19 tickets and piles on fees galore, finished at or near the bottom in all but two categories, dropping a spot in on-time arrivals and extreme delays from 2023. It did best in baggage handling, where it ranked third.
The overall scores fall off fairly dramatically after Delta and Southwest. Third-place finisher Alaska finished nine points below Delta, Allegiant 11.
Classroom discussion questions:
- In Chapter 6 of your Heizer/Render/Munson OM text, we discuss TQM. Which of the many tools are used in the quality ranking metrics?
- What would you do if you were Frontier’s operations manager?