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Abstract

The Airline Quality Rating (AQR) was first announced in the early 1990s as an objective mechanism of measuring airline service performance based on multiple selected criteria important to air travel consumers. Since then, AQR results have assisted the government in decision making and airlines in measuring service quality. Initially, annual AQR reports used weighted averages and monthly performance data in the areas of on-time arrivals, involuntary denied boardings, mishandled baggage and a combination category of customer complaints for which major airline comparative performances were reported. To further strengthen the significance of national AQR results, this article revisited AQR data sets and benchmarked four former reports. This article contains an introduction of benchmarking technique, AQR data collection and calculation, benchmarked results, and charts that help to track comparative service quality for major U.S. airlines’ domestic operations.

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Benchmarking Airline Service Performance

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