The Best and Worst Airlines of 2022
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Here's your Money Briefing for Friday, January 20th. I'm J.R. Whelan for The Wall Street Journal. From the boarding process to getting your bags at your destination, air travel can be a chaotic and frustrating experience for passengers. So which airlines managed that chaos best and made the skies a little friendlier for their passengers? The Wall Street Journal's annual scorecard of the best and worst airlines has the answers.
In 2022, I mean, they learned some very costly lessons. And so they're coming into 2023 with much more realistic flight schedules.
So which airline capitalized on those lessons and took top honors? And which airline had a more turbulent year than others? Our carry-on travel columnist Dawn Gilbertson will be here with the results after the break.
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2022 wasn't kind to airlines or to passengers, be it delays, canceled flights, bumping passengers. Some airlines handle challenges within their control and outside their control better than others. The WSJ Travel Bureau tallied up the good, the bad, and the downright messy in our latest annual airline scorecard. And our travel columnist Dawn Gilbertson is here with the results. Hey, Dawn, thanks for being with us.
Thanks for having me.
All right. Drumroll, please. Tell us, Dawn, which carriers came out on top and who didn't do as well?
Well, Delta is on top for the second consecutive year and fifth time in the last six years, followed by Alaska and Southwest.
And the top three, Southwest, after that mess?
Yes. Basically, they did really well before their meltdown at the end of the year.
Okay. And how about the bottom of the list?
Well, JetBlue is last for the second straight year, and just above it, doing better, was Frontier and then Spirit, their merger partner.
Now, I want to ask you more about the Southwest situation in a moment, but what were the categories by which the airlines were judged?
We rank the nine major U.S. airlines by seven categories, and it includes cancellations, on-time arrivals, flight delays, complaints, mishandled bags, and the like.
You know, it seemed like pretty much all the airlines had issues in 2022. It was a rough year, especially the first half of the year. What did Delta, Alaska and Southwest, what did they do right to make it into the top three?
It was a very bad year for passengers and for airlines. And what they did was they just, you know, they canceled that first half of the year. They canceled fewer flights than the others. Again, they're still not. I mean, Delta is known to brag about their performance and rightfully so. They're not really thumping their chest over this. Because they canceled a lot more flights than they typically do. So they just did less worse.
So it's like just sort of like go away, walk quietly and just whistle and come back next year.
I mean, they still they're still first, obviously. Right. But they weren't you know what I mean? They didn't shine in every category and they canceled over 30,000 flights.
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