With the dramatic decrease in the number of legacy airlines in the past two decades, it has become more of a challenge for airline analysts to come up with a Top 10, but there are enough of them that a new report by The Points Guy (TPG), a travel lifestyle website that has a focus on how to best use travel rewards, has ranked the 10 leading domestic U.S airlines from 1 to 10, and found that customers ranked Spirit Airlines the “worst” airline, i.e., No. 10. The “ultra low-cost carrier” was found to be the leader in the categories late arrivals, low customer satisfaction, not so comfortable cabins, and a lousy frequent flyer program.
It’s no coincidence that Spirit is often the cheapest way to fly, said Julian Mark Kheel, analyst at The Points Guy. Frontier Airlines landed just ahead of Spirit at the bottom of the list. “The key takeaway is that you get what you pay for,” said Kheel. “Spirit leads the pack with low airfare but that leaves them with less to put towards other [factors] like baggage operation.”
Here’s the full list of the Best –to-Worst Airlines (with #1 being the best) in the U.S according to TPG.
- Alaska Airlines
- United Airlines
- Virgin America
- JetBlue Airways
- American Airlines
- Southwest Airlines
- Delta Air Lines
- Hawaiian Airlines
- Frontier Airlines
- Spirit Airlines
A Note on Methodology: Sources used by TPG included the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, U.S. Department of Transportation, Routehappy, and others. TPG made a point of only evaluating “hard data,” making a list of 10 criteria, an then then quantifying the value of each criteria as follows: airfare (25 percent), route networks (15 percent), bag/change fees (10 percent), cabin comfort (10 percent), customer satisfaction (10 percent), frequent flyer programs (10 percent), on-time arrivals (10 percent), lost baggage (5 percent), domestic lounges (3 percent) and involuntary bumps, aka, overselling seats (2 percent).
