jaguar

HONOLULU, Feb. 3 /PRNewswire/ -- For Hawaiian Airlines, 2004 will be remembered as the year that Hawaii's largest and longest-serving carrier became America's most reliable.

The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) Air Travel Consumer Report for December, issued today, shows that Hawaiian Airlines led the nation in service. Hawaiian was #1 in punctuality, #2 in baggage handling and boarding reliability and in the top five on consumer complaints. No airline was better.

"This past year the people of Hawaiian Airlines raised the bar on service, not just for Hawaii but the nation," said Joshua Gotbaum, Hawaiian's Trustee. "Even more impressive is that the best keeps getting better: This year Hawaiian introduced the nation to Baggage Direct, so our customers don't have to lug their bags to the airport and through security. And next month, we're getting rid of the need to stand in line for interisland flights, by letting customers book their seats in advance."

Hawaiian averaged a 93.9% on-time performance for 2004, topping the industry every single month and easily outshining all other carriers. Just how much better was Hawaiian? No other airline came within 10 percentage points. After Hawaiian, the remaining top five in punctuality for 2004 were SkyWest Airlines, 82.7 percent; JetBlue Airways, 81.8 percent; Southwest Airlines, 80.1 percent; and ATA Airlines, 79.8 percent. The industry average for the year was 78.1 percent - 15.8 percentage points behind Hawaiian. According to DOT standards, a flight needs to arrive within 15 minutes of schedule to be considered on time.

Hawaiian was a top performer in the other three DOT consumer service measures:

Hawaiian finished 2004 with the second best record in handling customers' luggage, with 2.85 mishandled baggage reports for every 1,000 passengers. With its new Baggage Direct service, Hawaiian expects to do even better in the future.

The airline also had the industry's second-best mark for oversales. For every 1,000 passengers served, two were involuntary denied boarding. The industry average was four times as many.

As for consumer complaints, DOT recorded only 26 against Hawaiian during the year out of 5.6 million passengers served -- less than five for every 10,000 passengers.

slippahs

For all our laywers out there, here's a link to the above story:

http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/st...2947597&EDATE=

aloha

slippahs, Hawai'i airlines mod

hwk1948

This is a good example for the other airlines to follow!

channa

Not exactly. When you remove the Hawaii airports (where there is little congestion which causes them to get these good numbers), HA's numbers drop significantly has the lowest on-time performance of any carrier at the Top 31 "reportable" airports.

The fact of the matter is that HA will always do better than other carriers because they don't fly the same routes. If you fly HNL-KOA all day, you'll definitely expect better on-time performance than someone who flies DCA-JFK.

In fact, looking at HA's performance for Dec. 2004, they had 93.8% on-time performance, the best of any carrier. While, if you exclude much of the Hawaii stuff and look only at their performance in top markets (known as FAA "reportable" airports), their on-time performance was an abysmal 59.4%, the lowest of any carrier, including express affiliates.

lihue1k

Amen - this is a great example of exactly how useless statistics can be.

Oh and BTW if it's the great inter-island performance which pulls up their numbers (and I have no doubt that it is) wouldn't that argue against messing with the seat assignment / boarding process?

Aloha

Lihu'e

808

Channa, after reading your post I'm curious if you work for an airline. It seems to me that the average traveler does not keep track of the "reportable airports" on time statistics for the month of December. Also, could you please post a link to substantiate the numbers.
I fly Hawaiian twice a month interisland for business and probably twice a year to the CONUS for pleasure and I have no complaints. I used to fly AQ interisland until HA got the 717's and I've found that for the majority of the flights we actually leave the gate 5 minutes early. I guess I've been lucky on my mainland flights because I've experienced no big delays there either. For service, I would rate HA above average.
As for the assigned seating I'm all for it. If I can print my ticket online with an assigned seat that gives me about 45 more minutes of home time. Check in is a breeze and I don't have to stand in line early (local style?). I applaud HA for trying this out. If it doesn't work, modify it. If it still doesn't work then scrap it and go back to status quo.

channa

Sorry, I don't work for an airline. The numbers are public and are posted by the DOT every month here: http://airconsumer.ost.dot.gov/reports/ -- the Feb 2005 report is the one that contains the full year 2004 info.

What's interesting is that if you drill down into the mainland airports for HA in December and compare HA to others, it really shows off how bad they are:

Airport, Overall % Ontime, HA % Ontime
LAS, 72.1%, 67.7%
LAX, 72.9%, 60.9%
PDX, 68.6%, 62.9%
PHX, 70.7%, 51.6%
SAN, 70.0%, 61.3%
SEA, 66.9%, 48.4%
SFO, 65.8%, 67.7%

For their mainland operations, it seems that HA only performed above average in one out of 7 airports. And for those airports where HA underperforms, it seems that they do so by a wide margin (not just 1-2% below average). Which is why I laugh every month when they come out with the top stats for ontime performance. I know KOA and LIH have no congestion, and while HNL is the busiest airport in Hawaii, it's still very light compared to mainland airports. Which makes HA's mainland stats even more shocking. Some carriers are delayed because of delays at the origin city, when you figure that HNL is relatively free from delay, that means that most of the delays must be attributable to the carrier.

So, if you go to the delay causes, unfortunately it doesn't pull out just the "reportable" airports. But if you look at all airports for December, you'll note that 28.44% of U.S. flights are delayed, and 7.24% of all flights are delayed due to the carrier's fault. So 7.24/28.44 = about 29% of delayed flights are attributable to carrier delay.

On the other hand, with HA, 6.25% of their flights are delayed, and 4.86% of their flights are attributable to carrier delay. That means 78% of HA's delayed flights are due to their own causes.

Of course this doesn't necessarily mean there are operational problems, rather it further substantiates that HA is relatively immune from congestion and some of the weather-related issues that impact most U.S. carriers, since most of their flight operations occur in congestion-free, pleasant weather areas.

jtkauai

As their most frequent flyer, I concur about their far less-than-perfect X-Pacific record. In November and December I was moved twice by HA to AA when HA was late (as in arrived a day late the first time (LAX-HNL) and 3 hours late the next time (HNL-LAX)). Their problems run from poor planning in the event of aircraft problems, lack of communications with delayed flyers, and absence nearby aircraft. I thought they used to rotate an extra plane in at LAX, but I'm not sure they do any longer.

808

Channa, Thank you for the reply and the link. Looks like I've been lucky (hope it stays that way).

hwk1948

Any information or history on how HA is doing on their flights to Australia!

jtkauai

I can't tell you how they are doing, but I can tell you that you can almost always fly AC from HNL-SYD for 1/3 to 1/2 of what HA wants, by buying from either a HNL travel agent (see sunday Advertiser) or through airlineconsolidator.com Same 763. What would be the point on flying on HA?