Methodology For The 1998 Annual Airline Survey

<B> Methodology For The 1998 Annual Airline Survey</B>

Business Travel News' Annual Airline Survey is a first-of-its-kind measure of corporate travel buyer perception of airline performance in delivering service and negotiating.

BTN conducted the survey by sending out three separate questionnaires to a randomly selected subset of its readers. One survey contained a list of the 15 largest domestic airlines according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. The second and third lists were culled from a list of the 35 largest airlines flying to the United States from other lands, including both foreign-based and U.S.-based carriers. Back Associates of New Haven, an aviation industry consulting firm, provided the list, which was then divided in two and sent to different groups of readers.

Asked to grade only those airlines with which they had done business in the past year, respondents ranked the carriers on a scale of one (poor) to ten (excellent) in nine categories addressing services to the corporate travel manager and four relating to services to the traveler.

On the international charts, readers were asked to evaluate only the international operations of any U.S. airlines about which they were responding.

The categories were developed through a series of brief interviews with travel buyers, corporate agency managers and airline sales executives. Not every respondent rated every airline in every category, and those who left out a category in their ratings were not included in the average rating for that category or airline.

The survey was conducted in August 1998. It received 97 corporate and 64 agency responses regarding the international lists, and 70 corporate and 45 agency returns for the domestic chart. BTN cut the international list down to 23 and the domestic down to 14 by removing any carrier that solicited votes from under 30 percent of the overall sample.

To be fair to those who took the time to provide detailed responses, BTN also removed the surprisingly significant number of returns that rated the carriers zeros or ones across the board.

For their extra effort in helping develop the categories, BTN would like to thank Rob Callahan, manager of travel services at San Ramon, Calif.-based Pacific Bell; Philip Dunphy, manager of corporate travel at Pfizer Inc. in New York; Houston-based Alex Houston, Cooper Industries' manager of corporate travel and administration; and Kevin Mitchell, chairman of the Business Travel Coalition in Lafayette Hill, Pa. Consultants John Heilner of Management Alternatives and Rolfe Shellenberger of Runzheimer International assisted in analysis of the results.

R.I.C. Associates of Melville, New York, tabulated the results.