Survey Methodology

<B> Survey Methodology</B>

The second annual Business Travel News Airline Survey is a unique measure of corporate travel buyer perception of airline performance in negotiating for and delivering service.

BTN conducted the survey by sending out questionnaires to a randomly selected subset of readers. The survey contained a list of the 14 largest domestic airlines according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. Reno Air, now merged with American Airlines, was removed from last year's list (<I>BTN</I>, Nov. 2, 1998) and AirTran made its debut.

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 five (excellent) in nine categories addressing services to the corporate travel manager and travel agency distributors.

The categories were developed through a series of exchanges with travel buyers, corporate agency managers and airline sales executives. Editors eliminated passenger service categories from this year's questionnaire in order to reflect more clearly the way in which corporate air travel buyers perceive each airline. 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. All categories were weighted equally when calculating overall weighted score.

The survey was conducted in June, July and August 1999. BTN received back 304 total responses, including 247 from corporate travel decision makers and 55 from the travel agency community.

To be fair to those who took the time to provide detailed responses, BTN removed all returns that rated the carriers with zeroes or ones across the board.

R.I.C. Associates of Melville, N.Y., tabulated the results.