When you get off a flight, whether you take one or 400 per year, you definitely have a sense of: was the plane clean/dirty; were the food/drink offerings (and how they were made) to your liking; were the crew members on-board and the gate area staff rude/polite/friendly/helpful; if there was a glitch, was the staff accommodating/did they go the extra mile/were they indifferent; etc. etc.

Each and every flight is an airline serving its customers, and competition encourages the carriers to do better for their customers. Maybe someone flying to Wisconsin doesn’t know that they bake cookies on Midwest! Little things mean a lot in the airline business, and it’s those little things that each and every traveler has a right to an opinion about.

I travel more widely than most people (hundreds of flights annually on more than 20 airlines in all classes) but even so cannot rank airlines sufficiently well, in my opinion, just on my own experience. As a well informed traveller I can and do use other people’s experiences and information to gauge.

But the vast majority of those who complete these kind of surveys/awards do not, in my view, have enough experience or reliable information to make an informed opinion.

But the bigger question is how they go about finding these people. Do they actively solicit? If so, what’s to say that process isn’t inherently biased? Who are these people and are they truly a representative sample? We just don’t know and Zagat won’t tell us.

But I honestly don’t mean to single out Zagat here. Their survey just happened to be the most recent. Data manipulation is a problem in any survey and for something as complex as an airline, I don’t think they’re very helpful at all.

I doubt very much that that could be the case – the suggestion you make that perhaps the Zagat raters didn’t actually fly, but filled in the survey based on reputation, rumor and innuendo…. Zagat’s has built a nice business and it would be beyond idiotic to risk it in the way you suggest.

And CF, I disagree that, “it’s highly unlikely that a large percentage of people would have had the opportunity since they only fly to 5 cities,” because NY, SF, LA, DC & Las Vegas serve a huge number of passengers. In nearly 5 full months, it would be easy in those markets to find 7,000 Zagat people – business people who fly those routes regularly and expect more.

Basically, this survey ain’t worth a damn.