Tag: airline quality

OM in the News: Measuring the The Best and Worst Airlines

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:

  1. 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?
  2. What would you do if you were Frontier’s operations manager?

OM in the News: 2022 Was Not a Quality Year for the Airlines

Chaos. Bedlam. A nightmare. Frustrated fliers spared no superlatives when describing the mess that unfolded in 2022 as travelers returned in full force.

Delta had the lowest cancellation rate among major carriers included in WSJ’s rankings.

Delta Air Lines’ CEO described 2022 as “the most difficult operational year in our history.” This from the airline that The Wall Street Journal (Jan. 19, 2023) ranked first among nine U.S. carriers in its 15th annual airline scorecard. Alaska Airlines, featured in the Global Company Profile in Chapter 15 of your Heizer/Render/Munson text was a repeat runner-up, followed by Southwest, United, Allegiant, American, Spirit, and Frontier. JetBlue finished last for the second consecutive year.

Airlines are ranked by seven equally weighted metrics covering flight cancellations, on-time arrivals, delays, involuntary bumping, baggage handling and complaints.

The reasons for the industry’s problems are well documented, if little comfort to travelers. Fuller flight schedules to meet a surge in travel demand collided with staffing shortages and training backlogs. Air-traffic control issues multiplied. Extreme weather spread throughout the country. The year was bookended by holiday travel woes, with a messy summer-vacation season and hurricane headwinds in between.

Delta retained its crown by navigating the hurdles better than peers, but was far from perfect. The airline took the top spot in 3 of the 7 categories, down from five in 2021. Its on-time arrival rate of 82% beat all competitors, but was still down from 88% in 2021. The airline that for years has pledged to “cancel cancellations” canceled nearly 31,000 flights, more than three times the number it called off in 2021. Seattle-based Alaska would have edged Delta in this category were it not for the storms that socked the Pacific Northwest in December.

Allegiant Air, the carrier that shuttles vacationers from smaller cities to holiday spots like Las Vegas, Florida and Arizona, was ranked 5th and canceled 4% of its flights, the most of any airline. It also had the lowest on-time arrival rate, at 63%. But the airline was helped by its top showing in baggage handling and involuntary bumping.

JetBlue earned the title no airline wants—worst performing U.S. carrier—because it posted relatively poor numbers in nearly every category. It blames continuing operational issues on its heavy concentration of flights in NYC and the congested surrounding states.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. How do your students rank these carriers?
  2. What would be your strategy if you were Jet Blue’s operations manager?