On-time departure

[A Very Civil Pilot]

When booking a flight, how important is the airlines on-time depature record in your decision to fly with them?

How does it rate compared to cost, schedule, dep. airport, arr. airport etc?

The reason for asking is that my company see it as very important, but I never see any relevance to it when passangers actually come to book

[Final 3 Greens]

AVCP

I'm a FQTV business traveller and for me it is...

1 - the airline services the two airports (home and away), since I need to get there

2 - Can I avoid transit through the UK (security restrictions on bags are inconvenient - e.g. my bag missed a connection at LGW 10 days ago and was 36 hours late in arriving at my hotel - if I connected outside the UK, I could have carried it on as hand luggage)

3 - Service in general and reliability (including timekeeping), e.g. AZ is last resort and BA is not high on the list after all the threatened industrial actions and strikes

4 - Cost

So timekeeping is pretty important where there is choice on a route.

I take about 100-110 fights per year. If all all 30 minutes late, I've just lost over two days of my life.

That's why I also get wound up with security delays at the BAA airports.

[k3lvc]

I'm with F3G other than I don't have the benefit of being able to avoid the UK. Below relates to my mainly EU shorthaul experience of c.200 sectors pa

1) Overall door to door journey time in terms of getting to destination for agreed time

2) Cost (+/- 50%) i.e. will pay up to 50% more to get 1)

3) Previous experience on route (timekeeping, likely gate on arrival (can add 20mins to exit time), overal 'feel')

4) Likely size/type of a/c (hate little a/c in bad weather !)

Far more important than departure time is on-time arrival !!

[crewboi83]

I am cabin crew and was based over seas (Milan) for Air Europe when I worked for them some years ago now.
I travelled on a regular basis for work as I lived in UK, OTP was my main priority along with cost. Ryanair quickly lost my custom as they were often more than an hour late, Easyjet were not to bad into Linate, and it was also closer to my apartment in Milan. Alitalia - not a chance!

[spiney]

Certainly the carriers track record on dep/arr time is relevant, but not definitive - many things can transpire to wreck your carefully planned journey. Routing / choice of airport / schedule are all interconnected, and like the earlier post I'll try and avoid those airports where we know more sh*t happens irrespective of how good is the airlines record. Short-haul - I'll base it on schedule, reasonable connections, allowance for a bit of slippage etc. Long-haul increasingly I'll try and break up the journey a bit and stopover somewhere en route - intercontinental travel gets no easier with age and I can't stitch together the 3 flights, non-stop, and 24hrs door-to-door nonsense as nimbly as I once did.

Seats, flat-beds, if they're available, IFE and general cabin comfort are important considerations, food and drink less so - a flat bed is well worth a few hundred quid of my company's money, though not mine. Cost is only a consideration if I'm paying and ranks increasingly highly based on distance and the number of members of the spiney clan travelling.

[The SSK]

How many journeys are really that time-sensitive? If they are, how often is it that you have a choice of airlines whose schedules are so close that punctuality becomes an issue.

Take for example a trip from the near Continent (AMS, PAR, BRU) to London for a 10:00 meeting. Because of the hour change you have to take a very early departure or go the night before and spend a fortune in a hotel. So punctuality is a major factor in your decision, but early morning arrivals into LHR can spend an age in the stack no matter which airline you're on. So punctuality league tables will tell you the relative performance of BA, BD, AF, SN, KL but when it comes to an 09:00 arrival at LHR they all have the same problem.

However, punctuality is a perceived measure of an airline's efficiency, and travellers probably rate it quite highly in their criteria for choosing a carrier even though if they stopped to think, two comparative figures on a page probably have very little to do with what they will actually experience, and whether it matters anyway. And in marketing, perception is everything.

[slim_slag]

So punctuality league tables will tell you the relative performance of BA, BD, AF, SN, KL but when it comes to an 09:00 arrival at LHR they all have the same problem.You can get the actual data on the CAA web site which drills down to each airline on each route. Airlines using terminal 4 at LHR appears to have a much worse on time record than airlines that don't. Header page is here http://www.caa.co.uk/default.aspx?categoryid=80&pagetype=88&pageid=12&sglid=12

Only things that matter are:

1) Total time from door to door
2) Total cost from door to door

to which you might add

3) Avoid London
4) Avoid LHR
5) Avoid Terminal 4

Everything else is fluff

[pacer142]

I stopped flying with easyJet LTN-AMS weekly because of their atrocious punctuality on a specific flight, and also don't use VLM very often because of their tendency to "combine" flights (i.e. usually cancel the one I'm booked on and thus make me an hour late), even though VLM are otherwise a brilliant little airline.

KLM on LCY-AMS-LCY and BHX-AMS-BHX have, OTOH, proven extremely punctual and reliable, and that's the main reason I stuck with them.

[slim_slag]

That's interesting.

Looking at the actual 'on time' figures for 2006 from the CAA site cited earlier.

EZ. LTN-AMS 63%
KL. LCY-AMS 67%
KL. BHX-AMS 87%

So LCY isn't actually that much better than LTN but BHX is a lot better. Further evidence that you should avoid london if at all possible. Of course the big question is how long does it take to get to the other airports from your front door. Total time is what counts.

[WHBM]

Over many years and many trips I have not had many delays over say 1 hour. Really.

Of those that were, I do not think any of them could really be said to be carrier-dependent, so would not form part of any decision not to use a given carrier in the future. To me they have seemed fairly random.

[A Very Civil Pilot]

Thanks for the replies guys.

Basically it seems that the frequent flier/ commuter needs a more punctual service (no surprises there then!)

My airline is a charter (essentially) so the vast majority of pax are once or twice a year holidays. How relevant would you place on-time departure in this respect?

[James 1077]

Holiday-wise I wouldn't mind an hour's delay but any more and I would be very upset (as it is taking up some of my holiday time).

Coming back is generally more important to me as I normally try and extend my holiday as long as possible so it isn't unknown for me to get into London at 6:30am and go straight to work.

That said departure time is actually completely unimportant - it is arrival time that counts.

[WHBM]

Being from a charter background puts a different perspective on it.

Many passengers book such flights without having any idea about timings other than day of departure. And what you see printed in holiday brochures, maybe the year before, can have little relationship to the actual STD which is often advised only a few weeks before.

Then there is the matter of knowing the operator at time of booking, which again charter organisers can be coy about. In fact notably so when it is one of the lesser-known carriers. You can be booking with one of the majors with their in-house airline featured prominently in the brochure only to notice in the corner of the travel agent's booking screen that the airline code is from some here-today, gone-tomorrow Turkish charter operator.

What there is, though, is the influence on repeat business. If Britannia, or TUI, or whatever they are called this week are 4 hours late coming home, you will remember that when booking next year's flight. But it's probably more at the tour operator level than at the carrier level.

I suspect that quite a percentage of disembarking IT passengers can not give the name of the airline which has just carried them, particularly if they boarded through jetways and the boarding cards are printed on handling agent general stock.

[ExSimGuy]

For a 1-day business trip, a late departure can mean a meeting that is shortened in order to meet the return flight. So for me, departure reliability is high priority in such circumstances. This is increasingly so in these days when you are asked to arrive 3 hours before take-off, which means 6 hours of your day are going to be wasted in the airport.

It's years since I have done an IT (and I can't remember the airline!) but most of my long-haul travel is on holidays. A departure delay (up to a few hours) doesn't really worry me much in these circumstances as long as there's facilities available in the departure lounge for food, reading material, etc (or a hotel provided if it's along delay)

There is one airline that I avoid like The Plague due to departure reliability - the last time being a "under 2-hour" flight, from their own base, that took over 10 hours and 2 changes of aircraft!

Consistent bad departure reliability suggests poor maintenance to me (admittedly not always the cause) - relates to my safety:*