Overall airline performance falls in U.S., Delta bucks trend

In the turbulent wake of a slew of mergers and consolidations in the United States, airline performance is slipping says the just-released 2014 Airline Quality Rating, or AQR.

“Airline mergers and consolidations are taking a systemic toll that is bad for consumers,” says AQR co-author Brent Bowen, dean of the College of Aviation at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s Prescott, Arizona Campus. “Performance by the airlines is slipping while they claimed [mergers] would make them better.”

Co-author Dean Headley echoes Bowen’s assessment. “Bigger isn’t always better,” says the associate professor of marketing at Wichita State University. “The downturn in performance suggests customer perceptions of poor outcomes are warranted.”

The AQR looks at a quartet of criteria to come up with its ratings: on-time performance, involuntary denied boardings, mishandled baggage and customer complaints. Based on those factors, eight out of a dozen U.S. airlines saw their performance fall from 2013 to 2014. One carrier held steady and a trio of airlines actually improved. Delta Air Lines’ AQR ranking rose from fourth place to third, Southwest’s climbed from eighth place to sixth and American Airlines from ninth to seventh.

For the third year running, the highest-rated carrier in the land was high-frills, high-touch Virgin America.

  Read: Editors review of Virgin America

Last place belonged to Envoy/American Eagle, the commuter/regional airline. It placed twelfth. Fellow commuter/regional carriers ExpressJet and SkyWest fared comparatively poorly too, ranking eleventh and tenth best respectively. The lowest-rated major network airline was United. It ranked ninth.

AQR rankings may provide a bit of incentive for airlines to get their acts together. Take Delta. Bowen labels the megacarrier “an excellent example of a merger [with Northwest] that declined in performance and systematically has clawed its way back to a new high level of quality performance. This shows that if an airline commits to improving their AQR rating, they can do it.”