Surprise! Spirit Airlines is the undisputed champion of airline passenger complaints. In fact, it’s quite literally in a different league than other airlines — so much so that graphic artists making a chart of complaints had to omit Spirit (see above). Surprise No. 2, he said sarcastically: Among all other airlines, United is champion of negativity.
Meanwhile, Alaska and Southwest attract the fewest moans and groans, according to a new report by the Public Interest Research Group covering five years of consumer complaints filed with the federal Department of Transportation. About 10,000 fliers bother to fill out the paperwork to file complaints annually, says the report, titled “The Unfriendly Skies.”
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I’ll tell you what’s wrong with airlines. Let me use United as an example. The airline does research and discovers that passengers really want WiFi on flights, and it is losing to competitors like Alaska that offer WiFi more consistently. So what does United do? It starts advertising that it has WiFi on flights. It doesn’t spend money racing to outfit all its planes with WiFi, it merely spends money on ads. Saying your skies are friendly doesn’t make it so.
Of note from the report:
- Spirit Airlines is three times more likely to attract complaints than all other airlines. And that’s normalized data.
- Frontier Airlines saw a huge increase in complaints last year, setting it on a very bad trajectory
- Mega-merged airlines tend to beget more complaints. However…
Delta is an interesting case. Complaints against the airline, which absorbed Northwest in 2010, has seen complaints drop pleasantly in recent years. There might be a very good reason for this. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the airline is doing some really creative and sometimes expensive — things to avoid canceling flights. These include having more spare planes ready to fly and save passengers stranded by mechanical issues. Hooray for Delta, and other airlines better take note.
The chart basically speaks for itself, but just to make you feel bad, I’d like to march you down memory lane, to recall some of the rights you lost through airline deregulation back in 1978.
- Passengers who were delayed to use their tickets free of charge on other airlines
- Airlines had to honor tickets purchased from airlines that went bankrupt
- Airlines had to have minimum reserve equipment and staff available to avoid delays
Sure, prices went down after 1978, for a while — until airlines invented baggage and pillow fees. Meanwhile, the real promise of deregulation — which was supposed to increase competition — has been an abysmal failure. Rather than competition, we have mega-airlines. And by the way, how many new airports and airport hubs have you noticed lately? Every flight I take stop in New York, Atlanta, Houston, or San Francisco.
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