After an extremely challenging year in air travel that saw rafts flight cancellation and industry issues, wall street journal has released its annual grade major US airlines,
The list includes a surprise: Southwest Airlines, whose holiday slump stranded thousands of travelers at airports across the country over Christmas, finished third, trailing only perennial strong entrants Delta Airlines And Alaska Airlines,
Jet Blue finished last out of nine airlines, falling behind budget airlines Frontier and Spirit. United Airlines, Allegiant Air and American Airlines ranked fourth to sixth.
The top three airlines remained unchanged from last year’s rankings, with Delta also winning. Frontier dropped two spots with Spirit Rising.
magazine Determines its ranking by compiling quantitative data on each airline’s performance, tracking metrics such as flight cancellations, on-time arrivals, delays, lost baggage and complaints.
Overall, it provides a fairly comprehensive look at qualitative performance in an industry that has increasingly been under the microscope after a myriad of issues over the past several years.
The federal government spent billions to bail out the airline industry when air travel came to a complete halt, but shut down overnight during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, then saw airlines lay off many employees and Struggled to match its pre-Covid performance when air travel resumed. Honestly in 2021.
Airlines offered more flights again last year, increasing their offerings to meet general demand for air travel, but in some cases lacking the staff and technical investment needed to provide customers with a solid flight experience.
On-time arrival data compiled by the website Anuvu found that Delta led the way last year with 81.7 percent of its flights arriving on time — but that number was far below the 87.9 percent it achieved in 2021.
Alaska Airlines, which operates primarily in Alaska and the western United States, had a particularly strong year, but was hit by a year-end hurricane that caused Southwest to cancel thousands of flights.
insider Reported Cancellations increased 69 percent of total flights last year, though most of those cancellations occurred in the first half of 2022. Progressive lawmakers like Rep. Ro Kahana and Sen. Bernie Sanders called for stronger protections for passengers.