Airlines On-Time Performance and Customer Experience

Lufthansa has an innovation lab that is publishing some interesting data via their newsletter. Usually, those big company outlets are more of a marketing gimmick, but I find myself reading their content with interest.

A couple of months ago, they wrote about the correlation between the on-time performance (OTP) of an airline and it customer satisfaction rating. They found none.

I’m not surprised; OTP is just part of the experience, as the report states, the on-board services and comfort are also a big factor behind the experience.

To some extent, it’s okay to have delays, but more often than not, you are left with no clear information. How many times have you been waiting at the gate or seated in the plane and nothing happened past the time you were supposed to board or take off, and no announcement is made ?

Even if the airline is itself in the dark, they should at least provide a timeline for the next update, etc. Nothing revolutionary; this is part of the basic incident management best practices. They have manuals to manage IRROPs (irregular operations), but the chapter on customer communication seems to be very short or lacking.

(The lab also published a follow-up with more data since the initial research was done on a small sample of airlines.)