Just for fun, I decided to take a look at the on-time performance of major carriers and their regional partners in their biggest hubs since the most recent Air Travel Consumer Report was just released by the DOT with data for January. Not surprisingly, the regionals didn’t do too hot. In only one case (Mesa in Phoenix) did a regional outperform the mainline partner.
I originally got the idea to do this small bit a research when Brett Snyder wrote on his BNET blog that on-time results should be sorted by marketing carrier, and I completely agree. In some cases, there can be some big difference. For example, United mainline had a 76.1% on-time percentage in San Francisco, but SkyWest, who had 20% more flights, only earned a meager 53.2% percentage.
But some changes do need to be made before it would work to report results by marketing carrier. Right now, a lot of regional carriers are missing, just because they’re not required to do so. Currently, only “air carriers that have at least one percent of total domestic scheduled-service passenger revenues” need to share their numbers with the DOT. The only regionals who qualify there are American Eagle, ASA, Comair, Mesa, and SkyWest. ExpressJet and Pinnacle are also included in the report, but only because they share their numbers voluntarily.
As a result, it would not make sense to change the report as things stand today because it would unfairly report results. For example, it’s quite easy to check out American’s performance because Eagle is a huge operation. Sure, Chautauqua is missing, but that’s only 15 ERJs. On the other hand, it wouldn’t work to report a single US Airways number because the only operation that is in the report is Mesa out of Phoenix. It’s hard to look at the East network as Air Wisconsin, Chautauqua, Colgan, Piedmont, PSA, Republic, and Trans States are all missing.
It is useful, of course, to know how well specific regional carriers operate, but not as much for consumers, for whom the report is made. Let’s be honest here – the aircraft wear the mainline carrier’s colors, and the flights are always booked through the major carrier. It seems only fair to group all the results by major carrier. But for that to work either more airlines need to report on a voluntary basis, or the DOT needs to change the requirements on sharing results.
Honestly, this wouldn’t be a big issue for me if the airlines didn’t promote their on-time performance like United has been doing (the same can be said for US Airways last year). But, in United’s case, over a quarter of their domestic capacity for 2009 (as measured by ASMs) was excluded from that number. Does that really make any sense?
Anyway, you can check out the results I compiled here. (Unfortunately, Google Docs lost some of my formatting from Excel.)
Very interesting point. But I think there is a divide where a lot of people in the industry don’t see the regional carriers as the same as the mainlines. However, I agree, if they are wearing the colors of a bigger airline, the bigger airline does have some responsibility for the regional’s performance and company image.
David
Kinda funny how the network carriers use regional affiliates to make them appear larger to consumers, then don’t include their on-time numbers when they make their claims. American, United, and Delta all appear huge when you include regional flying, but take away that and they’re dwarfed by the likes of Southwest Airlines.