Many factors in determining best airlines for consumers

When you choose an airline, you want to choose the best line, right? But which line to choose is not clear. TripAdvisor says Southwest is best, but the latest Airline Quality Rating says Delta is best. Which is it?

That depends on how you measure “best.”

To an industrial quality control expert, the measure of quality is how close the product, as delivered, matches the product as designed. This measure specifically doesn’t include the question of how good the product is, as designed. So an airline with terrible service could show high quality numbers by promising only a bottom-end product then delivering that lousy product on time and without losing your baggage.

Most consumers, however, are likely also interested in how good the product is as designed. That measure has two components:

“Hard” product generally includes elements that are hard-wired into the product: seat width and legroom, airport gate design, and such. You can measure many critical aspects of hard product objectively.

“Soft” product includes elements that can vary from one flight to another with the same hard product: meal service, and especially the attitude and helpfulness of flight attendants and ground staff. You can’t measure soft product objectively; you need to rely on passenger surveys.

AQR’s ratings are a composite of four statistics compiled by the Department of Transportation. Three — mishandled baggage, involuntary bumping and number of customer complaints — detract from performance; the positive fourth factor is on-time performance.

Except for some complaints that might be focused on soft product, the AQR scores are in the mold of classic industrial quality control — how well each line delivered its product, not how good the product is. Delta came out as best this year, followed in descending order by JetBlue, Southwest, Alaska, Hawaiian, United, Spirit, American and Frontier.

TripAdvisor ratings focus mainly on soft product. It derives its ratings by compiling the results of comments submitted by ordinary travelers. And it’s clear that those comments are heavily weighted to reflect how respondents felt about a flight and an airline. This, in turn, heavily emphasizes favorable interaction with airline flight crews and cabin attendants.

The best ratings, especially, tend to focus on soft product. After all, almost all travelers recognize that in the main cabin of most lines, hard product doesn’t vary much from one airline to another. So what makes a trip stand out is an unexpectedly good meal or special attention from or assistance by an employee. An airline’s perceived fairness to travelers is also important.

On that basis, Southwest made travelers feel better about their trips than any other U.S. line. In addition to service, TripAdvisor contributors especially liked the Southwest’s “transparency” policy of two free checked bags and no punitive ticket exchange fees. TripAdvisor contributors also liked Alaska, Hawaiian and JetBlue. But Delta enthusiasts needn’t feel bad: TripAdvisor rates it above American and United, its primary competitors.

Neither TripAdvisor nor AQR focus specifically on hard product, although it is important to many travelers. By most measures, JetBlue has the best hard product in the United States; Southwest and Delta are a bit better than average.

When you measure different attributes, you get different results. There’s no contradiction, and nobody should be surprised. In fact, given the different measurements, the most significant result might be that you see more agreement between overall AQR and TripAdvisor results than you might expect.

Although the order varies, Southwest, Delta, JetBlue, Alaska and Hawaiian come out as winners by both measures. Maybe superior operational performance and traveler assessment are interdependent, at least to a degree.

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WTIC-TV Airline Quality Ratings says Delta Airlines is the best.