jordyn

I don't think you have any datapoints to the contrary, so I guess that's a tie?

jordyn

Well, that's because passengers don't care about D0, they care about arriving to their destinations on time, which AA is bad at despite it's focus on D0. More importantly, when you close the door on a bunch of late-connecting passengers, you cause them to get to their destinations MUCH later than they would have otherwise.

DOT should really have airlines measure "what fraction of passengers got from the start of their journey to the end of their journey on time" instead of (or in addition to) on-time performance for each flight. I suspect that AA would do even worse on this metric relative to the competition, and at the end of the day it's the only thing fhat's important to passengers.

bitterproffit

Yeah, that's how that works. LOL

If you don't think 9 vs 15,000 IDB is a significant difference in corporate philosophy towards customer satisfaction, then no data points will convince you otherwise.

cmd320

That's because it's a stupid blanket corporate policy that does not apply any logic to the scenario, and now you have a bunch of disgruntled employees who are so caught up in "D0" that they can't be bothered to apply thinking to a single other task.

Obviously before D0 Doug, operations were functioning at a higher level than they were after D0 was introduced and obviously now AA's delays aren't simply because the aircraft doors aren't closing at D0 but a whole multitude of other issues that the management team is clueless about.

Dallas49er

No surprise really, other than Spirit and Allegiants’ rankings.

40+ years in sales (Financial Services). My first day on the job in 1976, my 1st manager said “The key to success in this business is simple. If you take care of your customers, they will take care of you, good times and bad.”

Perhaps the good people in DL management have successfully embraced a culture of customer centricity, customer care, and customer respect and are being rewarded. Whereas the good people in management at AA seem to look at the customer from the opposite direction, and are being “rewarded”.

YMMV and safe travels, whomever you fly in 2020.

RoadWarrior200

Per Scott McCartney who writes the regular WSJ column Middle Seat, the rankings are a composite of seven factors. Involuntary bumping was only one of seven. Here are all seven factors for all nine airlines that were scored (AS being Alaska and WN being Southwest and where I’ve spelled out the other lesser known airline codes). McCartney said Hawaiian was not included because of their unique geography and route structure:

Overall Rank: DL, AS and WN (tied for #2), Allegiant, Spirit, Jet Blue, Frontier, UA, AA

On-Time Arrivals: DL, AS, Spirit, WN, Allegiant, AA, UA, Jet Blue, Frontier

Canceled Flights: DL, Allegiant, Jet Blue, AS, Frontier, Spirit, UA, WN, AA

Extreme Delays: AS, WN, DL, Allegiant. Spirit, AA, UA, Frontier, Jet Blue

2-Hour Tarmac Delays: WN, Allegiant, Frontier, Spirit, AS, DL, Jet Blue, UA, AA

Mishandled Baggage: Allegiant, Frontier, WN, DL, Spirit, AS, Jet Blue, UA, AA

Involuntary Bumping: DL, UA, Jet Blue, Spirit, AS, WN, Frontier, Allegiant, AA

Complaints: WN, AS, DL, Jet Blue, UA, Allegiant, AA, Frontier, Spirit

“Two-hour tarmac delays and consumer complaints from Transportation Department, based on 12 months ended in Oct. DOT involuntary bumping based on 12 months ended September. DOT mishandled baggage based on 10 months Jan.-Oct. 2019.

“On-time, canceled flights and extreme delays data for full year 2019 from masFlight, the flight-data analytics unit of Global Eagle. Includes regional affiliate flights and international.”

Also from yesterday's WSJ column: “On-time is a crucial measure of airline performance. Airlines that run punctually are not only more reliable for customers but also less likely to misconnect baggage or end up canceling flights at the end of a day. Many factors go into on-time performance: how the airline has scheduled the flight, what kind of preventive maintenance is done on the fleet, how many spare planes and reserve crew members might be available and how the airline recovers from storms and other disruptions.”

AANYC1981

Why on earth do we continue to fly this garbage airline? I include myself in this insanity.

MiamiAirport Formerly NY George

I've said it before Parker is a ROI Wall Street type but ROI can't measure everything. ROI might say if we bank hubs we're have this in additional revenue and this in additional costs and a decision is made on is revenue>cost. But that model doesn't measure bad flyer goodwill that results when people miss a connection, in the case of MIA sometimes the one flight of the day. Moreover, how are they treated afterwards. ROI can't accurately predict how many loyal customers the airline will lose because of limiting resources during irregular operations.

In reality the real bread and butter of AA flyers from a numbers prospective are business travelers that fly enough to achieve GLD or PLT. Not the (relative) few that spend over $25K a year on flying. Parker doesn't seem to interested in the former.

Herb687

If so, he's a really bad one.

jordyn

Nice strawman there. I agree there is a huge difference in corporate philosophy. In fact, offering generous VDB compensation to avoid involuntarily bumping your customers is a pretty customer-friendly approach. But the specific mechanism by which Delta achieves a VDB rate hundreds of times lower than AA's is through generous VDB compensation. It's also possible that they overbook less aggressively and/or have fewer IrrOps situations that result in overbooking, but you can see that Southwest (who doesn't overbook at all) has more involuntary bumps than Delta

And if you want a data point, the two airlines that have substantially upped their VDB compensation in recent years (United also caps out at ~$10K now) are the airlines that have IDB rates at least 10x lower than anyone else which is why they show up as #1 and #2 in the metrics now. (United was dead last before they made the change and is still pretty terrible in most operational metrics.)

jordyn

Wow, so AA is dead last in four out of seven categories, and not in the top half of any of them. That's just astoundingly bad. Compare to UA (second worst) which is not actually the worst in any category and near the top in one. AA is also worse than UA in six out of seven categories and just barely ahead in the one category they lead. So it's not even a very close battle for last place.

flyalways

Will Parker assume responsibility for these rankings and resign ?

Herb687

Allegiant should have very high rankings for on-time performance and baggage handling given the nature of their operation. The MD-80s are gone; they're all Airbus now so that lessens the aging aircraft issue maintenance delay potential. As for AAY's route map, pretty easy to avoid ATC delays when you fly to such metropolises as OWB, BLI, PGD, GFK...

Herb687

The fact that he still has a job is astounding. A few posts back, I posted the ranking that really matters to those who employ Parker. He's produced a negative return during a 12-month period where the stock market was up big and his major airline competitors all produced positive returns (one of them even beating the S&P 500).

TPJ

Now I always assume something will go wrong while flying with AA and I am genuinely happy/excited when nothing bad happens... This is how you increase customer satisfaction, right?