Complaints Go Down as On Time Percentage Rises

(MoneyWatch)  The August Air Travel Consumer Report is out, and a better on-time performance meant complaints went down. While the comparison isn't perfect, as you can see, when on time performance improves, complaints usually fall.

What about the outliers? We have to remember that many of these are looking at very small complaint numbers. Atlantic Southeast, for example, went from 14 complaints in August 2008 to 10 in 2009 despite a decrease in on-time performance as well. It's hard to infer much with those tiny numbers.

Delta and Northwest were probably impacted by the merger. When mergers happen, complaints go up until the bugs are worked out. That would explain many of their problems, but Northwest's awful on-time performance couldn't have helped either.

But the overall takeaway here is that performance is dramatically improved. Of course, traffic is down so that makes sense. Now if only we could get infrastructure improvements to get moving so we don't run into complete gridlock again when traffic grows.