New Data: The 10 Worst Airlines in the US

“I see you. I’ll get your water when I have a minute. Jesus Christ.”

Um, did… that… really just happen?

Strike three for Delta Airlines. More like strike 37. The bad service had reached the “Orbitz threshold”, where I would no longer purchase tickets from Delta, even if cheaper than the competition.

Life is too short to deal with surly nonsense, and — upon landing back in SF — I decided to poll Twitter to find out which airlines create the most collective misery. This would serve as my must-avoid list.

I also learned that two start-ups called PeopleBrowsr and Dolores Labs were simultaneously figuring out the same thing with really cool social search analysis.

Here are the results: the 10 worst airlines in the US according to customers…

Twitter + Slinkset

I used Twitter to drive people to a customized Digg-like page for the worst airlines, where companies were submitted and then voted up and down. Cast your vote here.

#1 – The Worst – Delta

Also submitted as “Delta Blows”, Delta get the ultimate F- for customer service, especially when you include the votes for Northwest Airlines (NWA) below, which they’ve absorbed into twin forces of suckiness. Bad customer service earned the Delta empire more than 30% of the total votes.

#10 – Air France (?)

See the exact percentages here.

Of course, there are limits and weaknesses to this data-gathering approach: the availability heuristic. In other words, as commenter John Fawkes observed: are the “worst” airlines just the most commonly flown? Would we also find them at the top of the “best” list?

To make this methodology work, it seems you would have to also run a “best airlines” poll using the same method, and compare the two lists. If an airline is on the worst list and not the best list, then and only then should you declare that popular opinion has voted it down.

The data published below via Dolores Labs accounts for size differences, and their full post includes observations on the best airlines based on sentiment in tweets.

Dolores Labs

Dolores Labs — think Amazon Mechanical Turk on steroids — published the PeopleBrowsr results in beautiful graphic form. The best and worst airlines were determined through frequency analysis of positive and negative sentiment words in tweets mentioning the airlines.

Here are the worst, in descending order of Hulk-smash feelings:

#1 – The Worst – Northwest (= Delta)

#10 – Southwest (by far the best large airline, based on this analysis)

So what are ‘negative sentiment’ words? Here are a few you might have muttered yourself:

See the full Dolores Labs results and insight here. Damn, them boys have some skills with making data sexy. Check out their Fleshmap from crowdsourced sex input. But I digress…

The moral of the story? Drop the extra $30 on tickets so you don’t feel like doing this to fools:

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