Continental Airlines for the second consecutive year took top honors in Business Travel News' Annual Airline Survey, with corporate travel buyers rating it as outperforming its domestic peers in half of the 10 survey categories.
Please click here to download a pdf of a chart of the BTN 12th Annual Airline Survey’s full results and domestic carrier rankings.Besting competitors in flexibility in negotiating transient pricing, distribution, problem resolution, communications and account management personnel, Continental also for the second year in a row edged out American Airlines for the top spot, this time by seven-hundredths of a point on an ascending scale of one to five.
American Airlines placed second on the strength of its flexibility in negotiating meeting pricing and negotiating services and amenities. Rounding out the top three, Southwest Airlines once again led the industry in overall price value and the quality of its customer service.
Corporate travel buyers, however, found little cause for praise this year, as less than one-tenth of the respondents said that overall airline customer service has improved in the past 12 months. Buyers pointed to their growing discontent with an airline industry that has continued to find new ways to charge for old things, while trimming services, frequencies and capacity. Each category that corporate travel buyers rated this year and last registered a satisfaction decline.
"The airlines have made some efforts, but I don't know if the industry has regained its trust over the degree of capacity cuts, the level of service and the general passenger indifference," said Ingersoll Rand director of strategic sourcing Tom Barrett. "I still think Continental has made the best overtures in general. The statistics bear that out, but I keep asking myself, what are we going to have to do to make this experience better?"
Airlines could start with being more flexible in negotiating pricing, according to the survey results. Published airfares have been down significantly this year, but respondents reported that carriers have been less flexible in negotiating—be that for transient discounts, group rates or soft-dollar benefits. When it comes to transient deals, the average rating in airline flexibility was 2.82 this year, down from 2.97 last year, while meetings pricing flexibility this year was down to 2.63 from 2.88.
"Each carrier has their own approach," said Advito vice president of business solutions Bob Brindley. "There is definitely a concern from an airline perspective: Yields are down, pricing has been down in 2009, and they're worried about the new normal, about business traffic not coming back to the pre-fourth-quarter-2008 levels. There's that level of uncertainty, and there's a couple of reactions: If they feel a program is not performing, they are quick to cut it or lower the discounts. However, in a number of bid situations, if a client can demonstrate that they are providing premium share or if they can prove that, even if their volumes are down, they are reducing the number of carriers in their program to drive more marketshare, then the airlines have been very, very competitive. If there's a situation where you can't drive more marketshare and your overall volumes are down, that definitely lowers your leverage with the airlines."
Though overall scores declined, several respondents said they have witnessed increased flexibility, with one respondent applauding a preferred carrier that "continued to be supportive even though our overall air volume has dropped significantly this past year."
With his company's travel volume growing this year and a travel footprint that includes more international trips, Steven Mandelbaum, managing director of information systems and travel buyer at The Advisory Board Company, agreed that carriers have been as responsive as ever.
"I've had more interaction with senior officers at carriers than I've ever had in the past," he said.
Winning in the category of flexibility in negotiating business transient travel, Continental senior vice president of worldwide sales Dave Hilfman said the carrier has strived not just to preserve corporate clients, but also attract more.
"When there is a smaller pie, we need to get a larger share of it," he said. "That is very much a focus: to maintain the business we have today—even if that is getting smaller in volume—then to go out and seek ways to get share from our key competitive markets wherever we can."
Continental this year changed its approach to corporate deal making, shifting from fare bands back to fare buckets. "We tried the fare bands, but the marketplace, our customers, told us they preferred the buckets, and that's what we've done this year," said Monisa Cline, staff vice president of North American sales. "It was a couple of years where we had the fare bands in place. We just transitioned back to fare buckets this year and restructured all of our agreements."
Regarding the transition, Hilfman added, "We heard loud and clear from a number of corporate clients as well as their consultants and TMCs. It was causing them a challenge in their analysis of corporate deals, since other carriers for the most part hadn't gone to this type of structure."
Cline said the categories in which Continental excelled—complaint and problem resolution, quality of communications and value of relationships with account managers—are "all tied together," noting, "It really comes down to the quality of the people and the quality of the relationships we have with our buyers. This is a big focus of the sales force. Our goal is to be the most visible sales force in the industry."
Airlines received the worst marks overall this year from corporate travel buyers in the category of negotiating services and amenities, with an aggregate score of 2.59 out of five, while written responses from some respondents bemoaned what they called "nickel-and-diming."
More troubling to other buyers is the inability of airlines to track spending on ancillary charges like checked-bag fees and their lack of success in negotiating such fees outright.
"I haven't seen an airline actually waive fees, but they do it in a different way," Brindley said. "They do it by opening up a large number of frequent flyer upgrades, and through that status you don't have to pay the bag fees. What we find for most corporate travelers is the number of times they actually check a bag is relatively small."
Mandelbaum said, "People grumble about the bag fees, but it doesn't impact us that much since the elite traveler doesn't pay it."
Still, Mandelbaum noted airlines have been charging such fees for more than a year, and they have yet to find a way to track them for corporate clients.
"They have to find a way to report that back to us," he said. "In the same way that the hotel gives us a folio—where you see the mini-bar and all that stuff—the airlines have to now give us a folio. The fact they can't track the bag fees is absurd."
Southwest has continued to maintain its first-place position in the areas of customer service and overall price value. Though Southwest has found favor with some customers for its "bags fly free" stance—like one travel buyer who applauded the carrier since it had "not charged for baggage or other amenities, whereas the other airlines nickel-and-dime you to death"—some airline analysts have criticized the carrier for leaving cash at the bag drop.
However, Southwest vice president of marketing, sales and distribution Kevin Krone said, "A lot of people do some very basic math and come to the conclusion that we're missing this tremendous opportunity. They'll simply say that Southwest Airlines carries this many passengers who check this many bags, and at $25 it's a lot of money. If it were that simple, we'd be doing it, but people recognize that when you charge them $25 to check a bag, that is in essence a $25 fare increase." Doing so, Krone said, would alter the carrier's low-fare image.
According to a Carlson Wagonlit Travel analysis released this month, "Southwest has historically shown an average segment price advantage over the large, U.S. mainline carriers," with average savings ranging from $3 to $17 per segment on five of the carrier's top 10 markets where there is "significant" competition from legacy carriers.
Although Southwest has preserved its low-fare image among survey respondents, "when you buy Southwest, you know what you're buying. Their brand is cheap," Advisory Board's Mandelbaum said. "The legacy carriers make you believe that their experience is fantastic. It's like the Ritz-Carlton. I expect more from the Ritz-Carlton than I do from the Courtyard. I also don't believe that Southwest is always the least-expensive option."
IncrediblE Shrinking Industry
From August 2008 to August 2009, airlines shed more than 22,000 full-time jobs, or nearly 6 percent of its full-time workforce, according to the latest data from the U.S. Department of Transportation's Bureau of Transportation Statistics.
Though those job losses have been spread throughout each carrier's organization—from ground crew to pilots, flight attendants to reservationists—Brindley said salespeople and corporate account managers have not been spared. That means fewer airline personnel to field calls, resolve complaints, structure deals and communicate with corporate clients.
"The carriers are always looking for ways to streamline sales and marketing operations, and the number of airline salespeople has continually gone down over the past 15 years," Brindley said. "Most recently, with some of the mergers, obviously there was consolidation of sales forces. I had some conversations with clients about a year ago, and the thought was that if carriers pull down 10 percent capacity, furlough flight attendants, pilots and ground crew, when do they have to start cutting back on their overhead? It's something they're looking at even more given the capacity reductions. This area has been cut back so much you wonder how much more it can be cut."
Matching supply with demand, carriers have continued to broaden those cuts. North American frequencies in October dropped 4 percent year over year, while capacity was down 5 percent. Those declines build on dramatic cuts that spread domestically in fall 2008.
In addition to fewer employees, those cuts have meant less service for corporate travelers, some respondents said. "I can get to most places using the carrier," one said, "but I am not happy that they have discontinued nonstop service to some cities I fly."
As airlines have made those cuts, they have expanded the degree of cooperation with alliance partners in the past year. The category of networks, airline partnerships and frequencies added to this year's survey received the highest marks from respondents, though there was no base from previous years on which to compare. Respondents rated United Airlines highest in that category.
"We didn't score as high as our new Star partner United Airlines, and that's a primary reason why we upgraded our alliance to Star," Continental's Hilfman said. "We wanted to have more scope and with 25 airlines in Star, it gives us great coverage. We often said that better is better, but in this case bigger is better, because this is a network business."
As Hilfman suggested, it's been a year of transition for most of the airlines in the survey. United and Continental are integrating their newly minted joint venture, American awaits approval from DOT to operate as an antitrust-immune partner to British Airways and Iberia, and Delta Air Lines and Northwest Airlines continue to integrate their merger and incorporate Air France-KLM into a transatlantic joint venture.
While discussing merger integration during the carrier's third-quarter earnings call last month, Delta president Ed Bastian said the carrier has "renegotiated more than 600 corporate contracts, which is driving incremental business volume as we sell the benefits of our combined global network for the first time."
As Bastian noted earlier this year, 2009 was to be a transition year for the new Delta-Northwest, which BTN asked respondents to rate separately since they continue to hold separate operating certificates.
Of the Delta-Northwest tie-up, Mandelbaum said, "Integration-wise, when it's done it should be great, but there's still a lot of growing pains, and they still have a ways to go. They advertise more integration than they have. I think they've done a good job of cherry-picking the best of everything to put the two together. How long it takes to get to that point, I don't know."
Though other major carriers also expanded their roles in alliances through antitrust-immune joint ventures, the benefits remain unclear to some buyers. "Are the ones with antitrust immunity really going to bring a better deal and a better value proposition?" Ingersoll Rand's Barrett asked. "If they still don't bear the lowest fare, I don't know what that value is."
With respondents rating quality of customer service for the seven largest airlines 3.10—down from 3.24 last year—Barrett cited former Continental CEO Gordon Bethune in saying that carriers need to return their focus on the basics. "Bethune's old thing was airlines had to get flyers safely to their destination, on time, with their underwear," he said. "That's where they have to restore the trust and confidence and try to actually create a good experience."
Rating Criteria Definitions Presented To RespondentsFlexibility in negotiating transient pricing: The airline's demonstrated ability to customize business travel program discounts and other negotiated pricing elements.
Flexibility in negotiating meeting pricing: The airline's demonstrated ability to customize meetings travel discounts and negotiated pricing elements for a preferred business travel buyer.
Flexibility in negotiating services and amenities: The airline's demonstrated ability to negotiate additional offerings for individual business travelers, including soft-dollar benefits and special VIP treatment in flight and at the airport.
Distribution channels: The airline's demonstrated ability to provide the most comprehensive published and private airfare content for preferred corporate bookings.
Complaint/problem resolution: The airline's demonstrated ability to respond quickly and effectively to business travel buyer and corporate traveler concerns.
Quality of airline communication: Demonstrated performance in informing travel buyers about airline management, products, programs, sales and service changes.
Value of relationships with account managers and sales reps: Demonstrated performance in the productivity and frequency of meetings with local, regional, national and other airline representatives and their power to negotiate agreements, offer options and make decisions regarding price and service.
Quality of customer service: Overall perception of airline based on timeliness, reliability and cleanliness of service; support from airline personnel and communication to travelers.
Networks, partnerships and frequencies: The airline's ability to provide the necessary service to the destinations your company's travel patterns require.
Overall price value: The perceived worth of an airline's service levels relative to fares.
MethodologyThe 12th Business Travel News Annual Airline Survey is a unique measure of corporate travel buyer perceptions of airline performance in negotiating for and delivering service and maintaining preferred relationships. This year, BTN again contracted Equation Research to host and tabulate the survey.
BTN this year added two categories to address the evolving needs of corporate travel professionals—distribution channels and networks and partnerships (see definitions above)—and discontinued one category that previously was included in the survey: Availability of timely and accurate contract performance data.
The categories presented in the questionnaire were developed through a series of exchanges with travel buyers, corporate agency managers and airline sales executives to reflect more clearly the way in which corporate air travel buyers perceive each airline.
Asked to grade only those airlines with which they did business in the past year, respondents ranked domestic carriers on a scale of one (poor) to five (excellent) in 10 categories. BTN averaged scores in each category to create the overall score for each carrier.
Not every respondent rated every airline in every category. Those participants who left out a category or airline were not included in that average rating.
BTN from late August through early October invited by e-mail a randomly selected subset of qualified readers, producing 453 responses, 186 of whom spent more than $500,000 annually on airline tickets.
Respondents whose organizations spent less than $500,000 annual U.S. booked air volume were excluded from the results in an effort to capture managed travel programs. Though similar to last year's methodology, this is a marked change from prior years.
Air program size distribution among the 186 respondents included in the final results was as follows: $500,000 to $1.9 million, 38 percent; $2 million to $11.9 million, 32 percent; $12 million or more, 30 percent.
The domestic survey contained a list of the 12 largest domestic airlines as identified by the U.S. Department of Transportation, excluding regional affiliates of major carriers. Airlines that elicited answers from less than 35 percent of the survey base were excluded from this report. Though their merger closed last year, Delta Air Lines and Northwest Airlines were treated as two carriers in this year's survey since they continue to fly under separate operating certificates.