Skift Take
Airline consolidation may have led to higher airfares and fewer flights, but the perhaps unintended consequence is that the percentage of flight delays in December are trending much lower now.
How late will you be home for the holidays this year? Despite the perpetual worry and pessimism around holiday travel, airlines have generally been doing a better job with making their schedule, according to historical data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. To make sense of the data, we crunched the BTS's numbers for the last nine years and sought insight from experts to see what was behind the positive trend.
Historical December performance
The graph below shows the percentage of December nonstop flights within the U.S. in the years 2003-2011 that were delayed 15 minutes or longer.
Of the seven airlines analyzed, JetBlue had the highest percentage (23.3%) of December flight delays over the nine-year period, while Southwest had the lowest percentage (17.7%).
The following were the historical December flight-delay woes of the other five airlines:
American Airlines (22%)
American Eagle (21.6%)
United (20.9%)
US Airways (19.8%)
Delta (19.53%)
Note: The data does not include the small percentage of flights that were diverted or canceled.
JetBlue's challenging holiday seasons
So if you were flying JetBlue in December over the last nine years, there was nearly a one-in-four chance that your flight would be delayed.
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