Music legend Bo Diddley once asked “Who do you Love?” and when it comes to US carriers, a recent survey of twitter posts suggests it’s still Southwest Airlines.
Online travel insurers Insuremytrip monitored 96,000 tweets mentioning the nine biggest US airlines over two weeks and found Southwest, whose stockmarket ticker symbol is LUV, rated the highest with seven in 10 twitter posts positive.
Not far behind was Allegiant Air (64.4 percent positive) followed by Alaska Airlines (62.1 percent positive).
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Delta led the big three with 51.3 percent of its tweets positive followed by United (50.5 percent) and American (44.2 percent).
Also recording more positive tweets than negative was JetBlue — but only just at 50.5 percent.
When it came to the question of who don’t you love, Spirit Airlines was a resounding last with just 31 percent of its tweets positive. Frontier Airlines was also a poor performer with 36.3 percent of mentions positive.
The survey looked at what was causing negative mentions for each airline and found delays were the biggest source of frustration across all airlines except Spirit, where cancellations topped the list.
United had the highest number of mentions for delays and more than a third of its negative tweets related to cancellations or delays.
Spirit complaints for these two areas topped 35 percent, the highest of any airline.
“While every airline experiences delays and cancellations due to factors out of their control, it seems United Airlines and Spirit Airlines are particularly substandard in the way they handle customers in these situations,’’ Insuremytrip said.
“Interestingly, Southwest Airlines (who received the least negative mentions overall) see their biggest complaint is about money, while the rest of the airlines have limited complaints about this.
“Furthermore, Southwest Airlines received the highest proportion of negative mentions for keywords regarding seating (15.7%), which may be due to their policy on not assigning seats.
“To conclude, while we cannot infer that this means one airline has more issues than another, it certainly gives us an idea of what each airline struggles with the most.”
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