In the 80's as the initial effects of deregulation began and more people were flying, it became apparent that airline food was horrible and more more flights were running late. My favorite cartoon strip was Bloom County. In a daily strip, it shows the characters laughing hysterically over a book. Steve Dallas come over and asks, what's so funny and Opus shows him the cover, "Airline Schedules."
When Congress stepped in and "demanded" accountability, the DOT began to issue their monthly reports and Southwest was not at the top but rather somewhere in the middle. There were some very turbulent years when Gulf War I broke out and Southwest was able to remain profitable and they fixed many of their scheduling problems and moved up. During several years, not only were they Number 1 in all 3 statistics for a single month, they held that spot for the entire year and they did that for several years in a row. Any Market 101 Professor will tell you to take an asset and let it speak for itself. Southwest started to market "Triple Play" touting their accomplishments. Triple Play was not authorized by the Government and the other other carrier's wondered where Southwest got the kahunna's to advertise Triple Play, but it was the truth. Northwest attempted to do some damage control and ran ads that THEY were the Number 1 On Time airline, as long as you omitted Southwest. Southwest shot back, very famously, with "Liar, Liar"
Southwest is no longer the Number 1 On Time airline and for that I agree should be addressed. I don't like excuse's any more than anyone else, but Southwest is a Non-Interlining carrier and they would rather operate a flight late and get their Customers to their destination than cancel the flight or not hold for connecting Customers. What a concept, help the Customer rather than worry about a monthly statistic.
There have been comments made that other carrier's schedules are more complex than Southwest's. What makes it harder if someone is flying from ATL to LHR on an International Flight or from LAX to PHX on Southwest or for that matter EWN to CLT on an Express flight. Each flight leaves, flies to the destination and lands. In each instance, the marketing department is determining which times work best and the revenue management team is working to maximize profits. Comparing US to WN, US is concentrating 3 hubs and flying 1300 flights daily flights and somehow that is more complex than Southwest flying 3400 daily flights. Out of the cities that WN flies to, they have 11 cities that have 100 flights or more. 4 of those cities, BWI, PHX, LAS and MDW are over 200 flights. As a point of reference, DL calls CVG, MEM and SLC hubs, but I don't think they have more than 200 Mainline flights out of those cities. (could be wrong). Southwest is not the point to point carrier they used to be. Sure they make their bread and butter on certain city pairs. Yet over 30% of their Customers are connecting somewhere in their system.
My original post in this topic states my opinion, and it's just that my opinion, and that is those Airlines that market themselves as flying to 200 plus destinations all over the world should not pick and choose which statistics they are to use when they publish their On Time records if they are going to exclude a major part of their operation i.e Express Operations. In fact if their entire operation, Mainline and Express come out to be #1, then go for it, advertise your rear end about it, just like Southwest did, because they advertised their entire record. The downfall of Southwest has been predicated for many many years over many different reasons. Because they are flying to a particular region maybe one contributing factor to a decline in their On Time, but it's not the sole reason. I further disagree that Southwest is becoming less distinct than other carriers. If they begin charging for a Customer's first 2 bags, impose ridiculous fee's to change a flight and their Employee's stop caring, then I would agree.
But as Jim pointed out in a previous posts, this boils down to mostly insignificant bragging rights as the average Customer does not make his/her decision on whether Airline A has a flight that operates 77% On Time or Airline B that runs their flight 83% On Time. The overwhelming option is price, then price and usually ends up as price.
