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The Wall Street Journal

https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/travel/best-airlines-2024-delta-southwest-ec7f51cc?st=7K8Mxv&reflink=article_imessage_share



The Best and Worst Airlines of 2024



How the top two performing U.S. carriers separated themselves from the pack in a near photo finish



By Dawn Gilbertson and Allison Pohle

Jan. 21, 2025 at 9:00 pm ET



There’s been enough drama in the past year to knock U.S. airlines off their game.



An Alaska Airlines blowout grounded dozens of planes. There was a failed JetBlue-Spirt merger and Spirit’s bankruptcy. A summer tech outage crippled Delta. Southwest Airlines faced investor pressure and said it’s switching to assigned seating. All while planes remained packed and air traffic congested.


The good news for fliers: Carriers held it together relatively well. They lost fewer bags. More than three of four flights arrived on time (by the government’s admittedly generous definition), on par with 2023. Cancellations were flat. Hold the thunderous applause, though. Bumping and tarmac delays were weak spots.


And the best airline is…


Delta took the crown again in The Wall Street Journal’s 17th airline scorecard, standing out in nearly every category.


This is Delta’s fourth consecutive win and seventh in eight years. It prides itself on reliability and customer service—it displays this and other accolades on stickers near its cabin doors—and commands a premium for it. There’s a reason those Delta tickets often cost more.


But this contest was a squeaker. Southwest finished a mere point behind Delta, with Alaska in third.


In our ratings cellar? Frontier. Spirit placed eighth and American Airlines finished seventh.


We rank nine major U.S. airlines on seven equally weighted operations metrics: on-time arrivals, flight cancellations, delays of 45 minutes or more, baggage handling, tarmac delays, involuntary bumping and what the Transportation Department calls passenger submissions (which are mostly complaints). We excluded Hawaiian Airlines, given its regional focus.


Delta’s first-place finish might surprise you if you witnessed the five-day meltdown after the CrowdStrike outage in July.


But it won’t get dinged for any passenger comments about the mess until next year’s rankings—DOT data only went through May. Delta had the third-lowest rate of submissions in our scorecard. Southwest had the lowest.


Delta finished first in on-time arrivals and was the only airline in the ranking to exceed 80%, though it was down from 83% in 2023. It canceled far fewer flights than in 2023, giving it the lowest cancellation rate besides Southwest. (This past year it ranked fifth in that category.) Delta’s weak spot: bag handling. The airline’s mishandled bag rate trailed those of Allegiant, JetBlue, Frontier and Southwest.

“For the fourth year in a row, this showing by Delta people reflects a safety-first, reliable and premium experience for our customers,” Delta said in a statement.

Southwest has plenty to celebrate. It had three first-place finishes; the lowest it ranked in any category was fourth. It was a strong showing for anyone who remembers its 2022 holiday-season meltdown.

“It’s a testament to our people, along with the resiliency, reliability and efficiency we’ve purposely built into our operation, that we canceled fewer than 1% of our scheduled flights and improved or held steady in nearly every category,” Chief Operating Officer Andrew Watterson said.

Frontier, the airline that draws you in with $19 tickets and piles on fees galore, finished at or near the bottom in all but two categories, dropping a spot in on-time arrivals and extreme delays from 2023. It did best in baggage handling, where it ranked third.

Frontier CEO Barry Biffle said in a statement: “We’ve recently made major operational improvements, with our completion factor in second place in December, and have cut complaints by over 40% year over year. We are fully committed to continued improvement in 2025.”


Spirit fared slightly better than onetime merger partner Frontier, but that is little consolation for passengers. The airline had the highest cancellation rate among the airlines in our survey at 1.88%, worse than in 2023, when it ranked sixth in that category.


A Spirit spokesman attributed over 80% of its cancelations to uncontrollable factors like weather and air-traffic control constraints given its concentration in the Southeast.

Inside the rankings

Here are six gobsmacking findings from our 2024 scorecard:


Vouchers for you and you: Delta involuntarily bumped exactly one passenger in 2024, down from three in 2023. That compares with over 13,200 passengers at American. Delta lures passengers to volunteer by offering cash or vouchers.


Cellar dweller no more: JetBlue frequently finishes last in our rankings but placed sixth this year. It posted the second-best baggage-handling rate and third-lowest cancellation rate. Last year it had the worst cancellation rate. The airline says it prioritizes completing flights over on-time performance and considers itself the “most improved” in this year’s ranking.

American’s baggage snag: American hasn’t gotten baggage handling under control, coming in last, as it has for several years. It mishandled bags at a slightly lower rate than in 2023, but admits “there is work to be done.”


Allegiant’s baggage brag: Budget carrier Allegiant, specializing in flights from smaller cities to vacation hubs, has had the industry’s best baggage-handling rate every year since 2019.

Mind the gap: The scores fall off fairly dramatically after Delta and Southwest. Third-place finisher Alaska finished nine points below Delta, Allegiant 11.

How we did it

On-time arrivals, flight cancellations and extreme delays cover the calendar year. They are provided by Pulse, a data platform from the aviation company Anuvu. Most of the rest, from the DOT, cover the most recent 12-month period available and begin in October or November 2023.

This year instead of complaints, our customer-satisfaction metric is complaints, inquiries and opinions fliers filed with the DOT, or submissions. The agency stopped reporting complaints, citing a backlog. The submissions data is for the 12-month period ended in May. It’s a good proxy: 91% of submissions are complaints. (And the winners and losers wouldn’t have changed had we eliminated this category this year.)