Consumer-friendly changes are coming to the Department of
Transportation's monthly Air Travel Consumer Report.
In August, the report will for the first time aggregate the
on-time, cancellation and involuntary bumping statistics of all flights that
are marketed by Delta, United, America, Alaska and Hawaiian. As such,
statistics for those carriers will include not only their mainline operations,
but also regional flights sold under such brands as United Express, American
Eagle and Delta Connection.
The three legacy U.S. airlines, plus Alaska and Hawaiian,
codeshare with a disparate list of regional carriers to operate their regional
flights. Among them are SkyWest, Republic, Mesa and carriers that are airline-owned
-- Endeavor (Delta), Horizon (Alaska Airlines), and PSA, Envoy and Piedmont
(American).
The updated Air Travel Consumer Report will look like this.
Other mainline U.S. carriers, including Southwest, JetBlue,
Frontier, Spirit and Allegiant, don't co-brand with regional carriers. Therefore, the Air
Travel Consumer Report has historically offered a more complete picture of their reliability
to consumers.
In a press briefing Wednesday, Blane Workie, an assistant general
counsel of the DOT, said the coming changes are among the biggest in the three
decades of the Air Travel Consumer Report. For the first five months of this year,
she said, flights operated by branded partners accounted for 25% of passengers
for United, American and Delta, and more than half of their domestic flights.
"We are making these changes to give consumers more
information than they are already getting," Workie said.
The new report will continue to have pages showing the
performances of large regional airlines, including Endeavor, Envoy, ExpressJet,
Mesa, PSA, Republic and SkyWest. But for mainline carriers, new pages will be
added to show on-time, cancellation and denied-boarding statistics by the
marketing carrier. Those pages will further be broken down to show how the
carriers' mainline flights performed in comparison with their branded regional
flights.
For example, on the on-time performance page, the public
will see a total on-time performance for Delta-marketed flights. In addition, a
second line will show the on-time performance for Delta-operated mainline
flights. A third line will show the performance of Delta Connection flights
that are operated by regional airlines.