Low-Cost Carriers Fare Best In Bad Group

You don't always get what you pay for... and sometimes, all-too-rarely, you may actually get more. Low-cost carriers AirTran, JetBlue and Southwest took the top three spots in a national survey of airline quality, while overall the industry fared poorly amid rising fuel prices and increasingly disgruntled customers.

At the bottom of the list released Monday were Comair, American Eagle... and at the very bottom, Atlantic Southeast Airlines.

Brent Bowen, a study co-author and professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha's Aviation Institute, says 2007 was the "worst year ever" for US airlines. "Overall operational performance and quality declined once again to the lowest level that it's ever been," he said.

The annual Airline Quality Rating survey found that more bags were lost, more passengers were bumped, more consumers complained and fewer flights arrived on-time than in the previous year.

The overall "quality score" the researchers gave the industry -- -2.16, as in "minus" -- was the lowest in the nearly two decades they've been studying the airlines.

According to the study, the rate of consumer complaints was up a whopping 60 percent last year. US Airways had the most complaints; Southwest had the fewest. In all, complaints were up for 15 of the 16 airlines included in the study.

Mesa Airlines was the only exception. Wichita State University professor and study co-author Dean Headley notes bout 37 percent of the complaints were for flight problems, including canceled or averted flights. About 20 percent concerned stolen, lost or damaged baggage. Eleven percent involved poor customer service.

On-time arrivals dropped for the fifth straight year, with more than one-quarter of all flights late, according to the survey. Southwest had the best on-time performance; Atlantic Southeast had the worst, with over 1/3 of its entire schedule delayed.

Full details of the survey are available at the FMI link below. You might want to stock up on anti-indigestion medicine first.

FMI: www.aqr.aero