Which are the best airlines in US this summer? Find out

Before booking a ticket, you might want to know the actual performance of the airline of your choice. However, there is very little information available in the public domain

Bowen has tracked the ups and downs of the domestic airline industry since 1993. Image source: Reuters

Before booking a ticket, you might want to know the actual performance of the airline of your choice. However, there is very little information available in the public domain. To the rescue of flyers, rushes a man who has been collecting this information since 1993! Bowen has tracked the ups and downs of the domestic airline industry since 1993.

For that he collected data from the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), Forbes reported. He has now revealed the best and worst airlines in the US. The government's Air Travel Consumer Reports from March to June, which measure airline performance through late spring, shows the following result.

The best airlines:
Delta Air Lines - Bowen says data suggests Delta would "probably be number one" in the airline quality rating (AQR). This is determined based on the first six months of the year.
Delta bumped only 13 passengers from its flights in three months, the least of any carrier. Delta also had the best on-time ratings in February (87.9%).

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Alaska Airlines - This airline won top spot for 2018. However, due to its merger with Virgin America, consummated in April, some of its key metrics have been declining which include on-time arrival performance.
JetBlue Airways - According to the report, JetBlue's numbers are solid but not as consistent as Alaska's and Delta's. In last year's AQR, JetBlue performed well in some areas while slipping in others. In on-time performance parameter it declined to 71.4 percent from 75.0 percent in 2016. It also has a customer complaint rate of 1.14 complaints per 100,000 passengers.

The man has gone further and even revealed the worst airlines:
Spirit Airlines - Spirit's on-time numbers and customer complaints make it a certainty on the bottom. Besides that, its customer complaint rate is 6.74 complaints per 100,000 passengers in 2016.

Frontier Airlines - According to Bowen, Frontier suffers from the Spirit model as passenger expectations are not being met, it was suggested.

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