Survey Methodology - 2000-09-18

<B>Survey Methodology</B>

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

<I>BTN</I> 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.

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 10 categories addressing services and value 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. Like last year, editors omitted passenger service categories from the 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 scores.

The survey was conducted in May, June and July 2000. BTN received back 275 total responses, including 211 from corporate travel decision makers and 64 from the travel agency community. Respondents average $11.6 million in U.S. booked air volume and represent all regions of the United States.

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 Smithtown, N.Y., tabulated the results.