By Dawn Gilbertson, Allison Pohle and Kevin McAllister
Jan. 24, 2024
On airlines’ long, uneven shift from empty flights to packed planes, 2023 will go down as the year they got their act together. Mostly.
Major U.S. airlines sharply reduced cancellations and improved on-time arrivals, a relief for passengers after big-time travel troubles in 2021 and 2022. Hold the confetti cannons, though: Baggage handling and tarmac delays remained iffy, and passenger complaints were stubbornly high.
Alaska Airlines had the lowest rates of canceled flights and extreme delays on its way to a second-place finish. PHOTO: ERIC THAYER/BLOOMBERG
Anyone who boarded a flight likely felt a sense of order not seen since 2019. Still, better is far from perfect as the industry faces air-traffic control issues, clogged airports, weather woes and unforced errors.
And the winner is
Delta Air Lines has led the pack in getting operations back on track. The airline took the crown—again—in The Wall Street Journal’s 16th annual airline scorecard. It is Delta’s third consecutive win and sixth in the past seven years. (Southwest dethroned Delta during the pandemic travel plunge of 2020.)
Alaska Airlines was a repeat runner-up. Budget carrier Allegiant Air jumped two spots to No. 3, boosted by fewer cancellations. That bumped Southwest Airlines to fourth.
Stuck in our rankings basement: JetBlue Airways. It notched its third consecutive last-place finish, which it attributes to congested skies over its New York City hub. Frontier and Spirit finished ahead of it.
We rank nine major U.S. airlines on seven equally weighted operations metrics: on-time arrivals, flight cancellations, extreme delays, baggage handling, tarmac delays, involuntary bumping and complaints. (Hawaiian Airlines is excluded given its regional niche.)
The first three measures cover the calendar year. They are provided by Pulse, a data platform from Anuvu, an aviation company. The rest, provided by the Transportation Department, cover the most recent 12-month period available and begin in October or November 2022. The exception is complaints, where the DOT has a major backlog, so those figures cover a seven-month period ended in May.
Delta didn’t fly away with the crown, but shined in a few areas and placed no worse than fifth in any category. It posted the industry’s best on-time arrival rate, at 83%. That was up from 81.7% in 2022 but down slightly from 2019.
Alaska is the only other airline that topped 80% for on-time arrivals. The industry average was 77.6%, meaning barely three of four flights arrive within 15 minutes of schedule. JetBlue was the tardiest carrier, with an on-time arrival rate of 66.4%.
Delta had the lowest rate of complaints and tied for first on involuntary bumping. The airline famously snags volunteers with generous offers to switch to a different flight.
Matt Sparks, senior vice president of operations at Delta, credits the airline’s 100,000 employees, 40,000 of them relatively new, for the airline’s strong showing.
Delta also reduced its flight cancellation rate to 1.2% of flights, from nearly 2%.
Other airlines showed more dramatic improvement on cancellations. Sparks said Delta isn’t happy with that outcome.
“If we’re finishing fifth, that means we’re letting our customers down,” he says.
American, ranking fifth in canceled flights last year, slightly outperformed Delta, Anuvu data show. Sparks says Delta has finished the year strong, with a 90% reduction in flight cancellations from October through December compared with the first nine months of the year. That equates to 1,850 fewer flight cancellations a month, he says.
United fell two spots, to sixth overall. Its cancellation rate improved, but not enough: It ranked eighth in that category, and in baggage handling, too. United executives point to strong year-end operations as a sign of improvement.
Gaining on Delta
Alaska gives Delta a run for its money as best operator every year and gained some ground in 2023. The airline, which battles Delta for passengers on the West Coast, finished with the lowest cancellation rate, at under 1%. The average was 1.3% in 2023 for the major carriers, down from 2.6% in 2022. (This year’s rankings don’t incorporate any impact from the grounding of the Boeing 737 MAX 9 after a harrowing incident on Alaska early this month.)
Alaska could have tied or overtaken Delta had it been better at baggage handling, where it ranked seventh.
“We are committed to improving our baggage performance and raising it to the level of reliability we offer in every other category of our operation,” a spokesman said in a statement.
He said Alaska is rolling out new baggage-tracking tools and processes, replacing pen and paper in some cases.
Best in baggage was bronze medalist Allegiant, which mishandled 1.72 bags per 1,000, compared with the average of 6.37.
Allegiant also scored high marks by not involuntarily bumping a single passenger from its flights and by ensuring its flights took off. The airline canceled more than 4% of its flights in 2022, bringing that rate below 1% in 2023. Although it climbed in five rankings categories and stayed in the same spot in two others compared with 2022, the airline ranked sixth in on-time arrivals and delays longer than 45 minutes.
The cellar dwellers
Southwest Airlines was dragged down by a spate of unhappy customers after its holiday travel meltdown in late 2022 and early 2023. The airline went from fewest complaints in 2022 to having a higher complaint rate than any airline but Frontier and Spirit. (Due to a data reporting lag in some metrics, the impact wasn’t fully reflected in our 2022 airline rankings.) The airline’s complaint spike and baggage woes were temporary, preventing it from falling further in the rankings.
“We took lessons from the end of 2022 and made sure that 2023 was a year of progress,” Southwest chief operating officer Andrew Watterson said in a statement.
Travelers had the most gripes with Frontier, which averaged 38.5 complaints per 100,000 passengers—four times the average rate across the nine carriers surveyed.
Their most common peeve? Flight issues. Nearly one-third of Frontier complaints related to flight problems, the DOT data show, while 18.4% dealt with refunds. Fares made up the third-most common reason to complain.
Frontier’s finish was a disappointment, Chief Executive Barry Biffle said in a statement, but the airline’s operations have been more reliable and complaints have fallen in recent months. (The DOT hasn’t yet released data on late 2023 complaints.) For December and the holiday period, the airline has its highest completion level in its history, and Frontier will simplify its network schedule, he said.
JetBlue finished last in four categories: on-time arrivals, canceled flights, delays longer than 45 minutes and tarmac delays.
The airline pins its problems on New York City airspace challenges, including weather disruptions and air-traffic control issues. Last fall, the Federal Aviation Administration extended its slot waiver, which allows carriers to reduce up to 10% of their flights there without penalty. JetBlue says this will help reduce congestion and help it operate better. The airline is focused on “controlling what we can control,” a spokeswoman said in a written statement.
She also pointed to reducing aircraft utilization and building in more buffer time between flights. JetBlue has also invested in technology to improve how it manages disruptions.
JetBlue launched a multiyear reliability campaign in 2023 and said it has shown early signs of progress. The airline canceled 1.8% of its scheduled flights, an improvement from its 3.3% cancellation rate in 2022, Anuvu data show.
“We have the highest level of exposure to New York of any airline, and that continues to make an apples-to-apples comparison with other carriers difficult,” the spokeswoman said.
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Write to Dawn Gilbertson at dawn.gilbertson@wsj.com, Allison Pohle at allison.pohle@wsj.com and Kevin McAllister at kevin.mcallister@wsj.com
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