According to a study by Forbes magazine, Southwest Airlines is America’s most reliable airline. There are some interesting learnings in this report, one of which is that discount carriers actually rank first in reliability compared to some of their larger competitors. Here’s what else we learned from reading this report.
- Southwest is the most reliable airline, Continental came in second, JetBlue came in third, Air Tran received a fourth place ranking and Alaska Airlines was fifth.
- For each of the years we studied, Southwest’s flights were punctual more than 80 percent of the time; the average was 76.8 percent.
- In terms of canceled flights, Southwest reigns yet again. The carrier canceled an average of 0.65 percent of its flights over the five-year period, compared with the worst airline, American, which canceled an average of 2.4 percent.
- AirTran, another budget carrier, had the fewest reports of mishandled baggage — a contentious issue now that airlines are charging as much as $50 to check regular-sized luggage. In 2007, AirTran had about four reports of mishandled baggage per 1,000 customers. The worst-ranking airline, US Airways, had 8.5.
