After a widely publicized incident in which a passenger was forcibly removed from a United Airlines flight, U.S. carriers recorded the fewest involuntary denied boardings on record, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.
The DOT’s Air Travel Consumer Report showed an involuntary bumping rate of 0.34 passengers per 10,000 enplanements in 2017, the lowest annual rate since the department began tracking the data in 1995. That improved on the previous low of 0.62 per 10,000 in 2016.
Those figures exclude travelers who agreed to voluntarily give up their seats in exchange for compensation such as travel vouchers, a common practice airlines use to manage overbooked flights and reduce involuntary denied boardings.
Beyond bumping, other customer-service measures also improved. In 2017 U.S. airlines reported a mishandled baggage rate of 2.46 per 1,000 passengers, down from 2.70 per 1,000 in 2016.
On-time arrival performance varied by carrier. Among the best-performing major airlines were United Airlines (84.6 percent on-time arrivals), Delta Air Lines (83.5 percent) and Alaska Airlines (83.4 percent). At the lower end of the performance scale were JetBlue, Frontier Airlines and ExpressJet Airlines, with on-time arrival rates of 74.1 percent, 75.8 percent and 76.4 percent, respectively.
Overall, the DOT data for 2017 indicate gradual improvements in several areas of airline service, driven in part by operational changes and the frequent use of voluntary incentives to manage overbooking.