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Comment by ComputerGuru | Hacker News Reader

Southwest is statistically the worst airline in terms of delays and cancellations but has deluded its customers into thinking its the best (according to surveys asking people to rate airlines on their reliability).

https://www.insidehook.com/daily_brief/travel/airlines-fewes...

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Thanks for not understanding statistics and linking to an article that also doesn't understand basic math.

SW has a high number of delays and cancellations BECAUSE THEY FLY A HIGH VOLUME OF PEOPLE. By percentage, they are in the middle of the pack for both delays and cancellations, which isn't great, but they are not the worst by any means.

How are HN people so consistently bad with basic information?

Probably because the raw data is often hidden from the readers so it’s hard to corroborate a stories statistical narrative.

Here is the data which backs up the majority of these low effort cancellation related news articles.

https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/flightaware/viz/Airli...

But also SW attracts very specific kind of customer. If you fly for business, or just can afford other airline, why would you fly Southwest?

SW is hardly even the cheapest. If not booking months in advance, SW is almost always twice the price of United or American, at least in my parts.

Maybe it has something to do with my location, but my experience has been that SWA is normally much cheaper than other airlines. I recently cut 70% off a trip I'm planning in May by switching from Delta to SWA. That's probably a uniquely extreme case, but I'll happily risk a delay of even a day or two if it saves me litterally thousands of dollars.

Southwest’s base fares suck, but their discount tier fares combined with frequent sales, the companion pass, and a decent frequent flyer program make them pretty competitive in my experience. That said, if you don’t live or travel on one of their major routes, they are a bad choice.

They are actually more expensive, which is why they do two things to fool their customers:

1. On their flight search page, it shows the prices on a per-leg basis. Every other airline shows round trip prices. That way, the initial result on Southwest looks great and it’s only when you get to the final payment page that you realize it’s actually twice as expensive as you thought.

2. They refuse to share their data with any of the third party flight search engines like Google Flights or Expedia. Again, so people don’t realize how expensive they actually are.

a. other airlines will charge for baggage

b. other airlines will advertise prices that don't exist: it'll be the base price for the seat, but all (remaining) seats will be of the upcharged variety, so you can't pay the base price.

When you make the adjustments to compare apples-to-apples prices, SWA's get a bit closer. (But I do think SWA does tend to not be the cheapest, unless they're having a sale.)

I actually prefer the per-flight¹ pricing, too. That's what I'm buying: two flights.

¹IIRC, the pricing is per-flight, not per-leg/segment. (But it isn't, as you say, round-trip.)

I fly all the time and SW is usually more expensive than American.

And that’s why they refuse to share their prices with Expedia and Google Flights. If people could more easily compare prices, Southwest would lose a lot of sales.

The statistics in that article are of the "damned lies" variety: none of the values are normalized (they compared simple number of cancellations and delays without taking that as a per flight value, or perhaps better, per passenger) and they treat all delays (and cancellations) as equal; I'll take an airline often delayed by 5 minutes over an airline sometimes delayed by 3 hours.

Perhaps it's true nonetheless, but the numbers there won't tell you.

(And IME, it's perhaps true that SWA is often delayed … but by tolerable amounts. Compared to delays I've endured with Delta, where, e.g., a flight was delayed longer than the time it would take the plane to drive at highway speeds, from where it was coming from. Or … also Delta … where I was cancelled on twice in the same flight. They wanted to go 0-3 but I gave up and bought a ticket on … SWA.)

Perhaps they are thinking frequency for a trip they take often. It matters less that your Dallas->Houston flight is late when there's another one in 30 minutes during peak times.

Deluded? Or could it be that customers value economy over predictability?

I believe this has changed in recent years due to similar hiccups, and their reliability in prior years was previously good.

I suspect also that, like JetBlue in its early years, a lot of its flights were out of secondary airports that are generally less exposed to a lot of operational disruptions. (e.g. they flew in Hobby in Houston early on). They also had the advantage of being in a region that per its name that probably has fewer weather issues in general.

The pattern I've seen over the years is that upstart airlines, as they grow, end up having to look--for various reasons--a lot more like legacy carriers over time. Whether that's flying into areas with seasonal bad weather, flying out of default airports, instituting various forms of passenger status, etc.

You are lucky if your flights are on time 75% of the time on average, with any airline.

Usually better I find as they overestimate the flight time as if headwinds are happening very time

Either you are very lucky, using a specific company with better odds then most or are not traveling very much.

I don’t travel much these days but I found it common when I did that you would get there before arrival time that is told to passengers. There is some buffer.

(in 2022)

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