Travel&Vacation

Ed Perkins on Travel

By the time you read this, you will have undoubtedly seen reports about the latest Airline Quality Rating (AQR) scores for 2006. They usually get a fair amount of publicity, and after this past winter’s major hassles, they’ll get even more attention than usual.

AQR scores are a weighted composite of published Department of Transportation data on on-time arrivals, denied boardings (bumped travelers), mishandled baggage, and complaints filed with the DOT’s consumer office. It is prepared by professors at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and Wichita State University and is based purely on statistics, not subjective surveys. Though AQR scores may help you choose an airline, what they really measure is airline reliability, an important factor in total quality.

The new report indicates that overall the industry’s performance was worse in 2006 than 2005. The ranking of the largest U.S. airlines, in descending order, is Hawaiian, JetBlue, AirTran, Frontier, Northwest, Southwest, Continental, United, Alaska, American, ATA, Delta, and US Airways. Ratings also cover five regional (feeder) lines, all of which score below US Airways. If you assume that last year’s performance is a reasonable indicator of what to expect this year, the numbers are probably a pretty good indicator of the odds of encountering a problem.

But those statistical data actually measure each airline’s performance, not overall quality. What else goes into overall quality? Certainly seating dimensions (legroom and seat width), in-flight entertainment options, food and beverage service (if any), ease and speed of check-in and boarding procedures, speed of baggage delivery, ease of website use, attention from ground and flight crew, availability of frequent flyer seats, and upgrades.

You could develop numerical measures of seat space and per-passenger food service expenses (we did at
Consumer Reports Travel Letter
), but you can’t really find measures for the other service elements of quality. Ratings of overall quality, therefore, depend mainly on surveys, and surveys are notoriously subject to biases and respondents’ inconsistencies.

Still, if you want to measure true airline quality as opposed to just reliability, you have no choice but to rely on surveys. Among the most extensive and most readily available to consumers is published by Skytrax, a London-based research and consulting organization. It covers some 480 airlines worldwide and rates them one to five stars:

• As is the case with so many surveys, airlines based in Asia and the Gulf region walk off with top Skytrax scores—the only lines to get five stars are Cathay Pacific, Malaysia, Qatar, and Singapore.
• Thirty-five airlines rate four stars, but the only U.S.-based lines in that group are three with restricted low-cost ratings: Frontier, JetBlue, and Midwest.
• All other U.S. lines, along with most of the others, fall into the huge three-star group.

Skytrax doesn’t release its precise methodology to the public. But it says that, in general, ratings are set in context: International lines have to pass tougher tests than domestic lines, and low-fare lines earn good marks if they deliver what they promise. What it doesn’t say—but what seems clear from the results—is that ratings are heavily biased toward business class rather than economy. How else can you explain a four-star rating for Virgin Atlantic, with its outstanding business class but underwhelming economy cabin?