Ringing the Call Button on Airline Customer Service

Do you have a friend that swears she’ll never fly Airline A because her flight was canceled once and she spent the night nuzzling an airplane blanket on an airport bench? And your neighbor says he’ll never use Airline B because it lost his luggage and he had to spend a week in China without his own wardrobe. Well, a new report rating airline customer service could help you avoid the same mistakes.

Upgraded Points, a leading air travel industry-watcher site, recently released details of its latest analysis of U.S. government-reported data concerning airlines with the best and worst customer service.

The summary of the data study analysis is as follows:

• The top three U.S. carriers with the best percentage of on-time arrivals were Hawaiian Airlines (86.5%), Delta (82.4%) and Endeavor Air (81.9%).
• The carrier with the worst record of on-time arrivals was ExpressJet (70%), followed by Frontier and JetBlue (both of which have just 72% on-time arrivals).
• ExpressJet leads in the highest percentage of canceled flights category (4.7% of their flights were canceled), with Envoy Air (3.8%) and Mesa Airlines (3.1%) close behind.
• Delta Airlines has the best record of fewest flights canceled (0.2%), followed by Hawaiian Airlines (0.4%) and Allegiant Air (0.5%).
• Overall, Envoy Air had the highest average number of bags per 1,000 mishandled (8.7 per 1,000), while Allegiant Air (2.0 per 1,000) and Frontier Airlines (2.9 per 1,000) had the lowest.
• Southwest Airlines had the worst record (49,191) in terms of the total number of mishandled bags and second-worst was American Airlines (47,243 mishandled bags).
• The airlines with the most complaints involved Frontier Airlines (27/10,000 passengers and 490 total complaints), Spirit Airlines (27/10,000 passengers and 771 total complaints) and American Airlines (17/10,000 passengers and 1,571 total complaints).
• Airlines with the fewest number of complaints included Skywest Airlines (5/10,000 passengers and 153 total complaints), Endeavor Air (4/10,000 passengers and 36 total complaints) and Southwest Airlines (3/10,000 passengers and 473 total complaints).
• In the area of flight problems, Republic Airways led the group with 87.1% of all complaints registered in that category, 26.8% of all baggage-related issues were reported for Sun Country Airlines, while 22.5% of all issues involving disabled passengers were reported for Allegiant Air.

For purposes of this study, available data from November 2018 through August 2019 was used from air travel consumer reports compiled by the U.S. government on customer complaints by U.S. airline and U.S. airlines with the highest percentage of canceled flights. The analysis utilized monthly averages, as well as per capita data, for the 10-month period. Only results for commercial U.S. airlines were tabulated.

This study additionally looked at two types of data for diverted, lost, damaged or delayed baggage — the average number of bags mishandled per 1,000 handled and the total number of mishandled bags. Moreover, the data analysis presented both the total complaints per month per 10,000 passengers, as well as the total complaints reported for the 10-month period of November 2018 to August 2019. The final area covered in this data study concerned airline rankings for each type of complaint.