Admit it, you’re tired of the self-serving “best of” polls that are published around this time of year. You want to know about the companies to avoid. Specifically, you want to know which airlines to stay away from.
A few weeks ago, my friends over at TripAdvisor sent me the raw data from their Fall Travel Survey, and I’ve taken the liberty of doing a little number-crunching.
So here, without further delay, are the worst domestic airlines, according to a survey of more than 6,000 travelers:
1. US Airways (407 votes) *
2. United Airlines (307 votes)
3. Delta Air Lines (305 votes)
4. Northwest Airlines (279 votes)
5. Southwest Airlines (276 votes)
6. American Airlines (229 votes)
7. Continental Airlines (191 votes)
(* includes America West)
Note: these numbers are for North American survey participants only. Another version, which includes the U.K. results, was published in a London newspaper and found — no surprise here — that Ryanair was the worst airline. Since Ryanair doesn’t serve any U.S. routes, I thought it would be best to filter those results out of this list.
I’m not going to comment on these numbers (I’ll leave that to my other blogging colleagues) except to say that it’s more than a little ironic that the airline with the lowest popularity rating is contemplating a merger with the third-most detested carrier. Great minds think alike.
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
It’s a sad day when I’m actually grateful that Northwest is only #4.
I’m shocked that Southwest is #5… I have flown with them for YEARS and think they are great… what’s wrong with you people… ha
I’m surprised the list isn’t deluged with low-cost airlines (maybe the larger airlines have more surface area and have more history with travelers). Ryanair is ultra-low cost and definitely in the business of human freight so it’s understandable that people trash them, however they will remain profitable for years to come.
Where’s the Airtran’s, the JetBlue’s (remember the 12 hour hostage crisis)? The fact that this list is underrepresented on the low cost side (at least in the US) speaks to how messed up legacy carriers are.
… I’d like to see how this list was built because its all wrong.
These airlines are on this list because they are major airlines. In other words, since these carriers have the most customers, this means that of the 6,000 people polled you will be much more likely to find a dissatisfied customer of one of the major airlines than you would be to find a customer of a low-cost carrier that has a much smaller customer base.
What you really need is to randomly poll customers of each airline to find the ratio of satisfied/dissatisfied customers for that airline, then compare those numbers across all airlines.