Dive Brief:
- American Airlines grew its net promoter score 11 points from 2019 to 2023, the airline said in its investor day presentation released last week.
- The airline attributed the rise to its improved completion factor, the share of flights that arrive as planned. American Airlines’ completion factor rose to 98.9% in 2023, up from 97.4% in the 2014 to 2019 period.
- Reliability is essential to the airline’s success with customers, according to American Airlines CEO Robert Islom. “We know that the best way to serve our customers — the way to move net promoter scores — is by delivering on the most basic, which is reliability, getting people from start to finish with their bags on time, every time,” Islom said, speaking at the J.P. Morgan 2024 Industrials Conference Tuesday.
Dive Insight:
Airline customer satisfaction has a basic foundation: passengers want to get to their destination in a timely manner.
“One of the most important things in the airline industry is on-time departure,” Ross Aimer, CEO of Aero Consulting Experts and retired United Airlines pilot, told CX Dive ahead of the Thanksgiving rush.
American Airlines has been able to increase its reliability by 1.5 percentage points.
“American Airlines has never been the best at operating reliability, but we are today,” Isom said at the J.P. Morgan conference. “American Airlines canceled fewer flights on a percentage basis than any other airline, including the industry leader that had been kind of entrenched for more than a decade. I feel really great about where we are.”
Prior to the pandemic, American Airlines was not known for reliability, according to Isom. The airline was going through a massive integration with US Airways beginning in 2015, which caused disruptions.
“As we went through the pandemic, we all suffered with start-up issues as we built back,” he continued. “But for the last 18 months, certainly in the last year, American Airlines has been the best in the business at producing capacity [for] our customers.”
