glasspilot1 said:
I think he is talking about this WSJ article.
Chataqua Airlines now "bigger" than Southwest! (Dubious NYC claims of Delta)
Sizing Up Delta: Is It Really the Biggest Airline?
Carrier Says It Is Largest
In U.S., but Data Conflict;
Canceling Out Newark
August 8, 2006; Page D6
Delta Air Lines has been doing a lot of bragging lately, claiming it has become "America's largest airline" and "New York's largest airline."
Yet by standard measures in the airline industry, those claims and others don't hold up. It all depends on how you measure size.
Size does matter in the airline business. The "largest" airline in a market typically gets a disproportionately higher percentage of traffic, especially high-dollar business travel. If you have the most flights and best schedule, or at least that reputation in the marketplace, customers tend to gravitate to you. That's why you frequently see billboards, advertisements and press releases heralding an airline's heft.
"We have made a decision that we will fight and win in New York," says Delta spokesman Kent Landers.
And in the fog of airline war, spin can be a major weapon.
Earlier this summer, Delta began claiming that "it is proud to be America's largest airline." The Atlanta carrier said in a June 8 news release that it has "more departures to more cities in the United States than any other carrier."
But the number of flights and the number of destinations have never been the accepted criteria for ranking airline size. It would be a bit like ranking retailers by the number of stores rather than sales, or scoring baseball games by the number of hits instead of runs.
The standard measure of airline size has long been passenger traffic, measured in revenue-passenger miles. That's a count of how many people you flew and how far you flew them. You can't really look at the number of flights to get a full picture since an airline with lots of flights on little planes might outrank a carrier that carried more people on big planes. And you can't get a complete reading just looking at the number of passengers -- how far you fly people matters, too. So passenger traffic, the combination of passengers and trip length, has been the accepted standard in the industry for decades.
By that yardstick, AMR Corp.'s American is currently the largest U.S. airline, followed by UAL Corp.'s United and then No. 3 Delta.
The Department of Transportation says there is no official barometer, leaving airlines to advertise as they wish. Delta used to claim it was the biggest U.S. airline because it carried the most domestic passengers. But Southwest Airlines overtook Delta in 2004 in that measure, says Dave Smallen of the DOT's Bureau of Transportation Statistics.
Now Delta thinks number of destinations is the best criterion because it shows "the network footprint," says Mr. Landers, the spokesman. "It makes the most sense to our customers to look at where you can take them," he says.
But it can be terribly misleading. By Delta's standard, for example, tiny Chautauqua Airlines, a commuter airline that is part of Republic Airways Holdings Inc., would be considered larger than Southwest. Chautauqua flies to 68 destinations; Southwest 62.
There are other problems with Delta's claims. In boasting about its size in New York, Delta has left out Newark's Liberty International Airport. That excludes Continental Airlines, which primarily flies out of Newark and is bigger than Delta on almost any measure in the New York market.
Continental flew to 139 destinations from Newark at the end of July, for example, while Delta flew to only 61 from John F. Kennedy International Airport and 31 from LaGuardia Airport, according to schedule data analyzed by Eclat Consulting. In the New York market, Continental is No. 1 in flights, seats, capacity and traffic. Delta's advertising in New York claims "Most Flights to Europe," but in the July schedule, Continental had twice as many flights to Europe as Delta.
"We define New York as New York City," says Delta's Mr. Landers.
Lots of cities have airports in suburbs or occasionally across state lines, such as Delta's Cincinnati hub which is actually in Covington, Ky. In Newark's case, the New Jersey airport is closer physically to Manhattan than JFK.
So linked are the three airports that in 1997 when Continental started touting Newark over New York airports (One ad asked, "What do you call someone going to JFK? Late."), then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani threatened to call a boycott of the airline before Continental agreed to pull the ads.
Asked about Delta's claims, Continental said it has spent 10 years investing billions of dollars to build its New York position. "No matter what the industry, we've learned that you can't establish yourself as a market leader overnight or even in a year," a spokesman said in a statement. "A credible marketing claim, especially in the Big Apple, needs to be built on substance."
Also irking Continental: Delta has repeatedly said it is "becoming the second-largest carrier to Latin America with 500 weekly flights to 47 destinations." The emphasis, Delta says, should be on the word "becoming." In fact, Delta is a distant third behind No. 1 American and No. 2 Continental, both of which have more than twice as many weekly flights as Delta and at least 20 more destinations.
"It's the goal we are stating," said Delta spokeswoman Betsy Talton.
Delta also boasted that "With the July 2006 schedule, Delta will offer customers more flights from JFK than any other airline in the market." But the schedule for the week of July 25-31 showed JetBlue Airways with 1,048 departures from JFK and Delta with 831.
Delta said that claim was based on a belief it would have more flights in July than JetBlue. But it didn't pan out.
Write to Scott McCartney at [email protected]
