Airline Complaint Statistics

Posted by Jill Browne Apr 21, 2007

Every month, I have been providing a summary of the Disability complaints made to the U.S. Department of Transportation, as reported by the U.S. government.

The latest summary is for the month of February 2007.

Some of the stories the numbers do not tell are probably the ones that would provide travellers with the best guidance.

For example, just because an airline has the most number of complaints in a given month does not mean that airline is the worst. If one airline flies ten times the number of passengers as the other, one would expect more complaints against the bigger airlines.

In February 2007, there were 5 Disability complaints against Northwest Airlines and 3 against JetBlue Airways. During the same period, Northwest Airlines had 3,935,762 enplanements (passenger getting on a plane), while JetBlue had 1,470,992 enplanements.

Across all complaint categories, Northwest had 0.86 complaints per 100,000 enplanements. JetBlue had 2.18 complaints per 100,000 enplanements.

In the Disability category, Northwest had 1.27 complaints per 100,000 enplanements. JetBlue had 2.04 complaints per 100,000 enplanements.

This demonstrates that even though one airline might have a higher actual number of complaints, the other is actually getting complaints from a higher percentage of passengers.

American Airlines and Southwest Airlines each had about 7 million enplanements during the month of February 2007. There was 1 Disability complaint against American and 0 against Southwest.

What does this say?

It suggests that these airlines are taking steps to make sure customers don't complain. The best steps to take are the ones which lead to happy customers. In the event a customer does feel badly treated, the next thing an airline can do is to fix the problem right away, so that the customer is not just satisfied, but super-satisfied.

As consumers, most of us are not likely to make a formal complaint to the government, especially since there is no monetary compensation likely to come our way from doing so.

It's easy to be negative about airlines and others when they provide mediocre or bad customer service.

However, to fly7 million people in a month and have zero complaints must be worth at least a tip of the hat.