Forbes
Americans Love To Tweet, Especially About Their Dissatisfaction With Airlines
By: Dan Reed
The Twitterverse sure seems to hate Spirit Airlines. And it’s not too fond of Frontier Airlines, either.
Those two low-cost carriers, which combined have a U.S. air travel market share of just less than 7%, ranked No. 1 and No. 2 in an analysis of negative comments made on Twitter about U.S. airlines. Sixty-nine percent and 64%, respectively, of all comments made about those two carriers were negative - by a wide margin the worst performance among U.S.-based carriers according to a report by flight insurance provider InsureMyTrip.
At the other end of the scale, Southwest Airlines, which itself began life nearly 50 years ago as a deep discounter but has grown into one of the industry’s biggest players while retaining some – but not all – of its low-cost carrier character, had the smallest percentage of negative comments on Twitter: just 30%.
“Social media is often where passengers turn to voice their opinions in real time,” said Ronni Kenoian, manager of marketing and ecommerce at InsureMyTrip. “And Twitter is one of the most powerful communication tools available. It is interesting to see how positive and negative customer feedback stack up – and, in turn, how airlines respond in an effort to improve customer service.”
The analysis covered 96,000 tweets about airlines posted in a two-week period in August using sentiment analysis software from Brand 24, a social marketing support company based in Poland. The analysis involved classifying each tweet about the nine different U.S. airlines as either positive toward a particular airline or negative toward any one of those carriers based on whether the use of key words in those tweets were used in positive or negative contexts. The analysis then ranked the carriers based on the percentages of comments deemed to be negative about each one of them.
Of the nine carriers ranked in the analysis, Frontier was the smallest in terms of market share at 2.8% and Spirit was the second-smallest with 4.1% of the U.S. air travel market. Both are tiny in comparison with the Big Three U.S. carriers – American, Delta and United, which have market shares of 17.7%, 17.2% and 15.1% shares, respectively, and in comparison with Southwest, which has about 17.4% of the U.S. market. The analysis did not reveal the raw number of tweets – both positive and negative – about each carrier during the analysis period, just the percentages of positive vs. negative tweets.
Of the Big Three, American fared the worst, also by a relatively wide margin. About 56% of the Tweets about the world’s largest carrier were negative, vs. 49.5% of the tweets about United and 49% of the tweets about Delta. JetBlue Airways tied with United with 49.5% of the tweets about it being classified as “negative.”
Twitter has become a well know place for consumers to go to lodge unofficial public complaints about companies with which they are upset or are dissatisfied, much like newspapers were a common place to lodge public but unofficial complaints before the advent of social media. So, it’s not surprising that the number of complaints would be relatively high, even for the best performing of the carriers. That’s because historically far fewer people have filed such public, unofficial compliments than have filed public, unofficial complaints about them. For whatever reason, people tend to be far less motivated to comment when their customer service expectations are met or exceeded than when companies grossly fail to meet those expectations.
Nor is it entirely surprising that Spirit and Frontier both fared poorly in InsureMyTrip’s analysis of Twitter comments. Both operate a relatively radical low fare business model that depends heavily on charging additional fees for checking, for carrying on bags, for selecting seats and for other services for which most conventional carriers never or sometimes do not charge. And both carriers also have established reputations for providing less than satisfactory service to passengers who, in many cases, initially were unaware of their fees-focused pricing policies. And negative reputations like that often have long-lingering effects on how such companies are perceived, even when they make measurable improvements to their service.
Nor is it surprising that Southwest came out on top with the smallest percentage of negative tweets. The Dallas-based carrier has long nurtured an image for providing excellent public service even though it continues to not offer some of the arguably higher levels of service that conventional airlines offer. As with negative images, positive images tend to have a long lingering effect on customers perceptions even when actual performance has declined. Southwest does not assign seats. Nor does it have first class seating sections, VIP airport clubs and some other perks common among the conventional carriers. Yet it largely eschews charging additional fees for bags or other services which not only very low cost carriers like Frontier and Spirit charge but that conventional carriers, to varying degrees, also now charge.
In fact, when analysts looked at the key words in Southwest’s positive tweets the words “customer service,” “luggage” and “food” frequently included. That last word – “food” – was especially interesting in that Southwest does not now and never has served food beyond small, complimentary bags of chips or nuts. Another surprise involving Southwest is that got the highest percentage of negative comments of all nine airlines in response category of “seating,” even though the carrier doesn’t assign seats and, unlike most other carriers, hasn’t made any big changes to its seating layout to cram more seats in the same out of space, thereby reducing passengers’ leg room.
But one surprising result was that Allegiant Airlines, another very low-cost carrier, had the second-best score in the analysis; only 36% of the tweets about it were negative. Alaska Airlines, the smallest of the nation’s conventional airlines, scored third-best, with 38% of its Tweets being classified as negative.
The most frequently mentioned negative comments in the analysis centered around the keyword “delay,” followed by “cancel” and ”customer service.” That adds fuel to the ongoing argument within the industry that the most maddening element of air travel these days among U.S. air travelers is the high percentage of flights that are delayed. Only about 80% of U.S. flights these days operate on time, using the U.S. Department of Transportation’s lenient definition of “on time.” Officially a flight is not counted as late unless it lands more than 15 minutes after its scheduled gate arrival time. Using the more precise definition of a late flight – one that arrives any time after its scheduled arrival time – the U.S. industry struggles to get even 70% of its flights in on time. In customer service quality terms that’s a product defect rate of 30% or higher, a rate that in most other industries would assure a business’ failure.
