rankourabu

JD Power 2022 is out
https://www.jdpower.com/business/pre...sfaction-study

AC ranking below average in North America for business, beating out only United and American
AC ranking dead last in Permium Economy
AC ranking below average in North America for economy, barely edging out United and Spirit (!)

ACYYZ/SD

And then there's poor WestJet dead last behind Spirit and Frontier. That in itself speaks volumes of a skewed survey.

YBang

Most of these industry surveys are mostly pay to play. More $(Sponsorships) = higher ranking most of the time

rankourabu

You are thinking of SkyTrax where AC is laughably a 4* airline, which is pay to play.

The JD Power survey actually surveys people who fly the airline. Whether the results are statistically significant or skewed is another story, but they are based on real surveys.

yulred

Skewed? In the Y / Basic Y segment, WS is clearly an overpriced ULCC (even got rid of their PTVs if I’m not mistaken). I doubt their basic Y product differs much, if at all, from Spirit and Frontier - aside from being exponentially more expensive.

Assuming airlines that offer ULCC Y products alongside premium cabins should translate into a superior perception of those Y products is a logical fallacy. If anything, WS’ ranking gives the survey credibility - WS charges more than Frontier and Spirit while offering the same-ish Y product. Why would it rank higher than any of them? Because it has a PY product up front? That has no bearing on Y pax experience.

AC has long been below average in JD Power surveys specifically because their methodology always includes costs and fees as a criteria. Given much higher than OECD-average airfares in Canada, that’s always going to bite. Especially since the survey targets Americans who know what a 2 hour flight should cost. Even if AC is objectively superior here and there in the J or Y cabins, is it sufficiently superior to justify the cost differential? Or to put it differently, is JetBlue Mint at whatever it costs (US$599 one way TCON?) really a worse deal than a C$900 transcontinental ticket in a 7M8 J seat that apparently reclines as much as an AC 777 Y seat?

I think a lot of folk here tend to forget that most people fly in Y, and while AC may have a solid J product, it’s Y products (SH and LH) are generally very poor - more like UA than LH or DL etc. Any properly conducted survey will capture that.

mahasamatman

I do a lot of surveys, and I no longer do JD Power because they're so poorly written. They're incompetently written and seriously biased.

Adam Smith

I wonder about the utility of a survey where the bottom score is so little differentiated from the top score. In J, the worst-ranking airline scores 7% below the top-ranking one; PY, 6%; Y, 12%.

If you're trying to decide between two airlines, the gaps will usually be even narrower. AC is last in PY, but only one point worse than UA's score (i.e. <0.1%), and only 2% worse than AA's score.

Even if the survey is totally accurate, I don't know what I'm supposed to do with the information. I'm not going to pick AA or UA PY over AC just because they scored a negligible amount better than AC, In Y, where the gap is biggest, F9 is only 11% below WN. If price and schedule were essentially indifferent, maybe that's enough? But if WN required an extra connection for the same price, or F9 were 30% cheaper, is that small supposed advantage worth the sacrifice?

yulred

I dont think anyone using these is looking to choose between, say, 7th and 8th; they’re only looking at the top 2 or 3 as the “best options” that they might pay a few bucks more for, and anything below average as “last resort”/“price is right” aka heavily discounted.

At the end of the day, it’s a “reputation” survey. And reputations do tend to matter in certain regions/segments. Witness LH/LX’s remarkably strong reputations around the world despite relatively weak J and very average Y offerings.

Adam Smith

But why should something that's only 6% worse than the absolute best product be "heavily discounted"? This isn't the Olympics or Formula One where ordinal is all that matters.

I'm not saying no one is using it the way you're suggesting, because I'm sure there are people who are. I just don't see that being a very good use for it.

yulred

Consider who the audience is for these rankings: not well-informed FFs who are invested in any of these airlines.

If you don’t know A from B, either because you’re from Brunei or the Yukon, and you want to fly around North America, this type of ranking helps you figure out which airlines you’d rather fly (broadly speaking, “above average”), and which airlines you’d rather not. The latter only come into play if theyre significantly cheaper at the time of purchase. All things being equal, the uninformed pax will pick DL first (on Canada routes at least), and WS last at the same price.

Theres also a significant population that pays close attention to the brands it associates with - and pays premiums for them. These folk are not all well-versed on the intricacies of each product in the sector - or the actual difference in quality; they’re just interested in which brands have a good reputation, and which don’t. Which ones you want to be seen using; and which ones you don’t. This survey plays to that crowd in much the same way as a Michelin guide book (or any number of websites) help tourists pick “above average” restaurants and steer clear of “below average” ones. The former inevitably make more money than the latter.

They don’t see this as 6% better or worse - they just see this as pax flying certain airlines being happier with the product than the pax flying certain other carriers. And that’s enough to make a decision.

I personally think folk here underestimate the damage CR has done to AC’s reputation by gutting Y to its current level. A lot of folk really don’t rate AC. Just ask a German or Swiss person (or an Indian) about what they think of AC relative to LH and LX. (Hint: the answer is in the Skytrax survey too - carriers with solid Y products tend to do better than AC regardless of how weak their premium products are). That plays into reputation.

ACYYZ/SD

Correct. And JetBlue and Alaska (two great airlines) score high in Premium Economy. A class of service that they do not even have configured on board.

yulred

Yeah, I have to admit I’m not a fan of the way these guys change the format of their results every year. Leads to these kinds of puzzles (think they once did short haul and long haul North America too, which was equally strange to decode).

In this case, they seem to be treating Y+ as PY, probably because the PY sample size is too small (WS + AC/US3 on a small percentage of routes), and the actual PY products are very similar to regional J/F.

In essence, AC “Preferred” seats.

arf04

Is it better to score high on a non-existing class of service than low on one you operate?

YOWgary

I spend about equal time north and south of the Business curtain, and will be flying AC, AA, DL and UA in the next three weeks, and from that perspective I believe this statement is only half right.

AC's Y product on the A220 is on par with anything the other three have to offer, while AC and each of the US3 also have older aircraft with seats long overdue for refurb.

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yulred

I suspect any comparison would depend on what one is comparing: the actual product (seat vs seat, meal vs meal) or what one has actually paid for it (value for money).

Having a hard product that is on par with other hard products doesn’t mean much if it costs a lot more for the same thing. The JD Powers surveys tend to capture that.

Are the costs for flights of similar lengths on the US3 and AC roughly the same?