The Points Guy Names Delta Airlines As Best Airline for 2019

The Points Guy has outlined the best and the worst American airlines of 2019 in its third annual survey. To begin with the final results at first, Delta Airlines has been established as the Best Airline, followed by Alaska, Southwest, United, Hawaiian, American, jetBlue, Allegiant, Spirit and Frontier. So, Frontier is the last one, or can be called the worst airline.

The question that naturally comes to mind is on what basis has the Points Guy come to such conclusions. Some of the criteria used by it have been outlined here:

a)      Percentage of flight delays and cancellations and number of destinations reached: Hawaiian Airlines has come on top in this respect as only 6.4% of flights were delayed for max 30 minutes. Cancellations on Hawaiian were also low at 0.3%. Frontier had most delays about 24.6% and jetBlue most cancellations about 2.2%.

b)      How likely are passengers likely to get ‘bumped off’ on a particular airline?- Delta came first on this metric. The airline had just 32 passengers involuntarily removed from its flight out of a 136 million flyers. On the contrary, Frontier bumped more than 1365 passengers out of 20 million passengers.

c)       Affordability- Spirit Airlines had the best fare cost per mile flown, whereas Southwest had best ancillary price.

d)      Comfort: Delta is the oldest fleet of average 17 years whereas Frontier has just 4 years as age of fleet. This makes Frontier the freshest in cabin experience.

Hawaiian and Frontier have widest seats at 18 inches on an average whereas Alaska has the narrowest seats at 17 inches.

Only Alaska airlines has power outlets on every seat.

jetBlue provides free Wi-Fi across its entire fleet, making it the only airline to do so.

With 52 lounges in 32 cities, Delta has the highest number of lounges across its network.

e)      Customer Satisfaction- Frontier has most number of complaints filed against it with DOT, at 778 complaints by flying just 19 million passengers. Southwest, which flies the highest number of passengers, at about 10 million, had lesser number of complaints at 602.

Spirit conducted itself really well in losing only about 1.7 bags over 1000 passengers whereas the American Airlines lost about 3.8 bags per 1000 passengers.

The significance of this survey is that the people are going to base their flying decision depending on the position each airline has got with respect to these metrics. So, the chances of getting Delta flight ticket reservations are more than that of other major airlines due to its overall superiority in these metrics.