Even with Delta’s CrowdStrike meltdown in July, it still had better on-time arrivals performance for the month than American. The latter was certainly more impacted by weather, but the results are still striking.
According to data from airline analytics firm Cirium, Alaska Airlines was the most on-time for July – followed by United. Delta, the perrennial champ, came in third thanks to their epic meltdown following the CrowdStrike outage. JetBlue and Southwest came right after.
Among U.S. airlines, American beat only Frontier and Spirit. When you’re behind JetBlue something went wrong with your operation. Something did. American will chalk it up to weather and that’s not unfair but they’ve been chalking problems up to weather quite a lot. If their hubs are more affected by weather during peak travel times when people are trying to get places in summer that’s worth knowing.
American’s completion factor was nowhere close to Southwest’s or Alaska’s, and it was behind Spirit’s, but they didn’t cancel flights nearly as often in July as Delta or United. That’s CrowdStrike.
At the start of summer I wrote that if passengers are getting delayed, cancelled, and diverted – and if their bags are lost, or they’re turned away from flying completely despite having a ticket – Department of Transportation reports shows that it’s probably happening on American Airlines.
For an airline whose CEO’s sole focus has been operational reliability, they haven’t been that reliable. And the tradeoff of this for focus on the details of customer experience hurts. It’s no secret how to fix this airline and it comes down to leadership – sweating the details, and executing on more than just the table stakes of getting customers to their destination on schedule.
American has talked up the quality of their operation, but hasn’t been able to tell me what’s different that makes their operation better than it used to be. I tend to think that when they’ve performed well it’s been luck, so when they perform poorly that’s bad luck too. They are expecting not to make any money in the third quarter, encompassing late summer. That tells me winter is an open question at best.
They need to perform well, but that’s table stakes. With new higher labor costs for flight attendants coming (when the tentative agreement gets ratified) they need higher revenue, too. They need to sell their product for more than they do today. And that means a focus on more than just basic, reliable transportation. That means delivering on a better customer experience.
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