Airline Complaints: The Winners and Losers

by BNET's Warren Greshes

With airport security getting tighter, lines lengthening and business travel getting to be more of a hassle than ever, here’s an update on how the airlines are doing and which ones are making our travel experiences worse than they already are.

Thanks to an assistant I didn't have to go through all 45 pages of the Air Travel Consumer Report for September 2006. Instead, I got to read the complaint data! It lists complaints against U.S. airlines by category for July 2006.

If we start out by just looking at the 7 major airlines (American, United, Delta, Southwest, Northwest, Continental and US Airways Group), we find there are no surprises. United led the way with 111 customer complaints in July (I guessed this correctly before I even saw the survey), followed closely by American and American Eagle with 108; US Air with 102; Delta with 85; Northwest 53; Continental 49; and surprise, the major airline with the least amount of complaints in July: Southwest with only 21!

Here’s something even more remarkable. The complaints were broken down by category, i.e. flight problems, oversales, baggage, reservations/ticketing and others. Under flight problems (the one that can really screw up your trip) United had 39 flight problems in July alone! American 29; Delta 28; US Air and Continental 19; Northwest 12 and Southwest ZERO! The only other airline with zero flight problems was Jet Blue (the best of the small airlines). Remind me again about the claims that Southwest and Jet Blue are only doing business because of cheap fares.

Oh and in case you were wondering only American flies more passengers than Southwest. Delta is 3rd in passenger volume, United 4th (but 1st in complaints), US Air 5th, Northwest 6th and Continental 7th.

Hope this info is helpful to you when planning your next business trip, although you might want to think about driving.