The U.S. Department of Transportation has released its August Air Travel Consumer Report. This includes information on airline delays, cancellations, mishandled bags and other operational details for June and for the first six months of 2025.
With private data from Cirium we know more recent on-time performance but this digs into how airlines do at each airport, and by specific time of day.
Looking at official data, we see that in June the best-performing airlines for on-time arrivals were:
- Hawaiian
- Spirit
- Delta
- Alaska
- Southwest, United (tie)
- JetBlue
- Allegiant
- American
- Frontier
Hawaiian benefits from usually very mile weather in the islands. American has had an awful summer. Things are bad when your operations are worse than JetBlue’s. Spirit Airlines is struggling financially, but they’ve been running an on-time airline. Frontier Airlines always does poorly with this.
I tend to think Spirit has overinvested in its on-time performance, and isn’t being rewarded for it (perhaps given its toxic brand). Meanwhile Frontier knows that its customers pay for low fares in incovnience. Although even they have been trying to get better, with planes sticking close to assigned cities, flying more out-and-backs, in order to localize disruptions.
For the first six months of the year, on-time rankings looked similar at:
- Hawaiian
- Southwest
- Delta
- Spirit
- Alaska
- United
- Allegiant
- JetBlue
- American
- Frontier
Southwest and Spirit both improved year-over-year, while Delta’s on-time performance declined (but did improve in August, beyond the scope of this data).
But on-time operations aren’t the only important piece of information. Allegiant, Hawaiian, Southwest and Alaska did the best completing their flights. They held down cancellations to below 1% of their operation for the first six months of the year.
American, on the other hand, was by far the most likely to cancel flights (at 2.69%). Meanwhile, Delta’s reliability fell the most year-over-year at 1.22% cancels versus 0.65% in the first six months of 2024.
American didn’t just cancel the most flights, they mishandled the most bags too. And while Southwest may often take a while to deliver bags to the carousel (and certainly in comparison to Alaska and Delta), they did a great job with mishandled bags – only JetBlue and Allegiant performed better. Allegiant isn’t transferring bags between airlines (like Southwest) or between aircraft generally. So it’s hard for them to lose luggage.
While American is the worst with bags, they’ve at least gotten better, so they aren’t the worst by as wide a margin. Indeed, in the first six months of 2025 United was almost as bad.
And, surprisingly, American actually wasn’t the worst with mishandling wheelchairs during the first six month of 2025 on a per capita basis. JetBlue was actually worse. (So American was ranked #9, and JetBlue dead-last at 10th.) When broken out by ‘operating carrier’, though, American’s wholly-owned regional carrier PSA was dead-worst per capta (#14).
American continued to involuntarily deny boarding to more passengers than the rest of the industry combined.
Delta Air Lines did not involuntarily bump a single passenger during the first six months of 2025. American involuntarily bumped 7,163 passengers. That’s actually up compared to last year. (Southwest involuntarily denied boarding to about 100 passengers each during the period.) Frontier, though, is the most likely to do it.
What’s going on here is that Delta has a lot more voluntary denied boardings. They just make passengers whole with compensation. They offer gift cards, not just travel credit, and consistently are willing to increase their offers to several thousand dollars until passengers agree to take later flights. American, on the other hand, just says tough luck – we’ll pay the required minimum.
- Delta’s method is better for passengers, who get more compensation
- And it’s better for passengers because the people taking a later flight are the ones who opt in (and are therefore the least inconvenienced).
Unsurprisingly, DOT data shows that American was by far the most complained about airline in June (1,996 DOT complaints is more than double United and Delta). American had by far the most civil rights complaints as well. American was also the only airline with a reported injury to an animal in June.
The most complained-about foreign carriers were Turkish and Qatar, followed by Air France and Lufthansa. The most complained about travel agency was Expedia.
The report doesn’t just show which airlines are doing well – there’s data-backed wisdom to base travel planning as well. Across the 30 largest airports, on‑time arrivals are most likely first thing in the morning – starting in the mid‑80%s in the 06:00–09:00 block and degrading into the 50%s–low 60%s after 5 p.m. Overall, things get even worse flying later.
Major U.S. airlines (via Airlines for America, the trade association) are proposing to eliminating or scale DOT reporting and consumer protection requirements, including this Air Travel Consumer Report. Their lobby shop filed a 93-page comment arguing the requirement to report performance statistics publicly constitutes an unnecessary reporting burden.
Broadly speaking I’ve agreed with the airlines that some recent DOT rules exceed the agency’s statutory authority, so as compensation arequirements and strict guidelines on how airfares and schedules can be displayed (the Biden administration lost out in the courts over forcing all fares to be shown inclusive of fees like a single checked bag). There’s no congressional legislation requiring this – just the broad mandate for safe and efficient air transportation, and against unfair and deceptive practices.
However basic reporting of which airlines get passengers, bags, and wheelchairs where they’re going is the kind of transparency that directly cuts against unfair and deceptive practices – and, indeed, even knowing whether an airline is behaving deceptively requires some basic data on its performance.
So basically AA’s ops have been the pits this year. What value proposition are they even offering these days, beyond AAdvantage (which is still good, but not as good as it used to be. Award prices on AA metal have been on a slow creep upwards).
this is a valuable report which should be reported on each month and should continue to be required for airlines.
AA’s hubs are just too tightly scheduled to work well.
NK and WN’s operations are much better than they used to be but there are too many strategic issues which operations can’t overcome.
UA’s baggage handling is often down at the bottom of the industry with AA even though UA does better w/ on-time
DL clearly makes the math for its DB compensation work and also runs the consistently highest LFs in the industry
My takeaways:
1. AA is in a tailspin and don’t check a bag
2. NK is not as bas as people like to think
3. DL’s performance has eroded
4. B6’s anemic performance will be stressed by opportunistic growth until they stabilize operations.
5. You get what you pay for at Frontier
When I lived in Seattle I would sometimes fly Delta to Las Vegas
One Friday, Delta asked for volunteers. I accepted. The gave me a $600 debit card and put me in a flight 2 hours later.
One the replacement flight, we were seated and about ready to go and a gate agent came on and asked for one volunteer. I immediately got up and yes, got another $600 card.
My Vegas arrival way delayed 5 hours but I was already $1,200 to the good…not too easy to do in Vegas.
AA would have fewer operational issues if they came to terms with the fact that selling 37 minute connections at CLT is a terrible idea.
I once nearly misconnected on an 80 minute connection because CLT’s alleyways are always congested (this is particularly bad over at the PSA operation).
Parker,
and yet DL is still at the top of the industry which would seem to mean the rest of the industry has eroded too.
and you forgot to mention that UA’s baggage handling is not much better than AA’s.
You can understand AA’s baggage handling issues given its short connections but, honestly, why is UA’s baggage handling so bad?
The issue AA has it heavily banks flights and crews often switch a/c for each segment worked. Granted DL and UA bank flights but AA has never seen to be able to do it efficiently.
Banked flights are great when things work right. Most people aren’t heading to a lounge and are sitting in coach so the less overall travel time to their destination the better. It provides more revenue for airlines. But when things go work because of weather there’s a lot of planes without crews or unable to find an open gate.
@Tim Dunn Boy, you can spin things like a top.
1. DL is behind HA and NK for on-time arrivals in June and behand HA and WN for YTD performance.
2. DL is behind FIVE airlines for flight cancellations (and this is despite sometimes delaying flights 16+ hours).
3. DL is behind SIX airlines for number of mishandled bags.
Operational reliability my ass.
What’s fascinating is that AA has sacrificed so much customer good will and employee morale in order to make “on time” the top priority. And they still screwed it up. Again.