Tzuzi the 'comfort dog' watches as travelers make their way through departures at L.A. International ... [+]
Airline executives collectively can now begin chanting, “We’re No. 12!”
Unfortunately, they’re 12th worst in terms of providing customer satisfaction out of a field of 47 industry sectors graded in the 2018-19 American Customer Service Index.
The airline industry has long ranked in the bottom quarter of all industries in the well-regarded ACSI, which has been produced now for 25 years by a team of researchers affiliated with the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. And that continued in 2018-2019, when 77% of the other industries measured by ACSI researchers via interviews with more than 300,000 U.S. consumers scored higher than the airlines did.
ACSI Customer Satisfaction Index Results For Travel
Looking on what amounts to the bright side – by looking more deeply in the industry’s scoring details – U.S. carriers as a group continued to show the effects of modest improvements made in three core customer service categories: on-time arrivals, booking websites and bag handling performance. The industry scored an 80 for customers’ satisfaction with on-time arrivals, matching last year’s score. The ACSI report, however, made no mention of the subtle addition of several minutes of scheduled flight time to many – maybe even a majority – of airlines’ flights over the last couple of years. That’s a bit of schedule fudging that hasn't actually improved their operating efficiency. But it has made them appear to consumers to be a little more efficient than a few years ago.
Their 2018-2019 score of 74 (on a 0-100 scale) actually was a point better than in 2017-2018. And their 12th-place from the bottom performance also was better – but not by much – than last year, when airlines placed 8th-from-the bottom, but out out of a field of only 45 service industries. And it’s way, way better than 2007-2008, when the airline industry’s ACSI bottomed out at a horrible 62 (on a 0-100 scale). The industry actually scored a tad lower (1) in 2001, but that was the anomalous year of the 9-11 terror attacks that forced the grounding of all air service in this country for days and caused widespread fear that cratered demand and pushed carriers to the edge of bankruptcy.
Gas stations and wireless telephone service providers actually tied the airlines with ACSI scores of 74 each. The nine industries that performed even worse than the airlines when it came to satisfying their customers over the previous 12 months included a number of industries already well-known for less-than-stellar customer service: health insurers; investor- and municipally-owned utilities; internet social media service companies; landline telephone service providers; the U.S. Postal Service; video-on-demand service providers; and, bringing up the rear, internet service providers and subscription TV service providers. Those last two both scored a bottom-of-the-barrel 62. Video-on-demand service providers scored 68 on the ACSI, while the others at the bottom of the list earned scores of 70 to 73.
The top scoring sectors in the ACSI currently are: breweries (85); personal care and cleaning products (83); TV and video players (83), automobiles and light vehicles (82, food manufacturers (82) and soft drink makers (82).
The ACSI is a year-round research project that issues four reports a year, each focused on different groups of companies. The Spring report each year focuses on airlines and travel-related companies.
Individually, Alaska Airlines moved to the head of the airline class in the ACSI with a very respectable score of 80. It was followed by Southwest (last’s year leader – and a near-perennial at the top of the group) and JetBlue, which both scored 79. JetBlue actually climbed a point from a year earlier. Southwest fell a point. It faced a very tough period in the first three months of this year (while the interviews were still going on) because of more than 9,000 cancelled flights in the period related to groundings necessitated by mechanics’ labor protests and, subsequently, the world-wide grounding of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft. Southwest, the world’s largest operator of 737s, has 34 MAX planes in its fleet.
Delta was the top performer among the Big Three conventional airlines operating global networks from bases in the United States. It scored a 75, up a point. But the other two members of the Big Three, American and United, both ranked below the group average of 74. American fell a point from the prior year to 73. United actually showed a dramatic three-point gain in its customer satisfaction score from a year earlier, but that still was only good enough to register a 70 on the ACSI.
One ultra-low cost carrier still managed to beat United; Allegiant scored a 71. Two others, Frontier and Spirit, scored 64 and 63, respectively.
The ACSI reported today that “except for a few minor improvements, most aspects of air travel are the same as they were a year ago.” That conclusion, it said, was based on passengers’ comments to ACSI researchers.
The researchers this past year did add five new elements to its scoring of factors impacting airline customers’ satisfaction: cleanliness (of airplane cabins and restrooms); overhead storage; complimentary food; premium (purchased) food; and in-flight entertainment. Passengers were somewhat satisfied with cleanliness. Both scored 78. But travelers remain unhappy with the amount and availability of overhead storage on board (73). They also are dissatisfied with the food, whether it’s complimentary (think: small bags of nuts or chips) or supposedly higher quality purchased food (think: cold sandwiches, packaged cookies, etc.).
Both kinds of food got a 73 from ACSI’s respondents. Worse, passengers only gave a satisfaction score of 71 to airlines’ in-flight entertainment offerings. The ACSI did add that consumers’ scoring of in-flight entertainment did vary widely between individual carriers, but it did not provide details about which carriers’ entertainment options were more satisfying than others.’
And it’s no surprise at all that consumers continue to agree that leg room, or the lack thereof, remains the most dissatisfying aspect of air travel. They gave the industry a score of 69 on that, and that’s with the responses of passengers who paid more to sit in business or first class or business class seats or in those seats in economy sections as having a couple of extra inches of leg room having already been averaged into the overall score. Thus its reasonable to assume that the large majority of passengers – those who sit in regular economy seats – were even less satisfied with the leg room afforded them than that overall poor score of 69 would indicate.
The ACSI also scored the customer satisfaction performance of both Internet Travel Service providers – the websites that allow consumers to book online without going through the airlines’ own sites – and hotels. As in the past, both out-performed the airlines on the ACSI tables, with hotels collectively scoring a 75 and the independent travel websites scoring 79. Both of those sectors have been marked in the last few years by significant ownership consolidation, with the few remaining dominant players each offering different branded services aimed at different demographics.
TripAdvisor topped the group with a satisfaction score of 82 followed by Orbitz (owned by Expedia) at 81, Expedia itself at 79, Travelocity (also owned by Expedia) at 77 and Priceline at 76.
Among the big hotel chains the top performer was the JW Marriott luxury chain with a score of 84. Other luxury, “upper upscale,” “upscale” and “upper midscale” brands dominated the top half of the rankings of 31 different brands. Not surprisingly, economy hotels dominated the bottom of ACSI hotel satisfaction scoring table, with Days Inn scoring 68, Econo Lodge scoring 67, Super 8 scoring 65 and Motel 6 ranking last with a score of 63.
