For the first time ever, I’m doing a reader survey. The main goal of this is to learn more about what you like and what you don’t so I can tweak the blog to make it better. Please go in and answer every question honestly. Here’s the link:
The Cranky Flier 2010 Reader Survey
http://surveymonkey.com/s/cranky
Thanks for doing this. I’ll keep it open for a week (and will remind you on every post next week). Hopefully the results will lead to a better Cranky.
Oh, and if you want to talk about something down below, how about the Zagat Survey which came out this week?
13 comments on “Topic of the Week: The Cranky Flier 2010 Reader Survey”
Alitalia wins something…and it’s not a Cranky Jackass award!
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/alitalia-awarded-best-airline-cuisine-by-global-traveler-magazine-111193564.html
Well, you figure if Alitalia is going to win something, it’s going to be food, right?
I don’t know if it’s all part of the same survey, but I do see CO mentioned a lot for service and have seen many times AA getting hit marks from the Latin and Gay community.
But you can’t judge anything by just one survey someone puts out. If not many people who took the survey have flown say Virgin America, that airline would not get high marks when they could be much better then the airline the did. So people shouldn’t always go by what a big yearly survey like Zagat says.
Oh I forgot to add, thanks for doing your own survey today.
But here’s a survey question for you Brett.
It’s your blog and you mix up topics, but what would you like to blog more about?
Well, I blog what I like to blog about, so you can see the answer to that question every day. But there is more out there that I’d like to write about than I actually have the ability to do, so if people overwhelmingly prefer one type of thing to another, I’m happy to make changes.
Section 2.2 of the survey is broken – it is applying a single selection to both rows and columns (only rows is needed)
I was taking that to mean that one was to give a value to each item so as to establish a ranking order. So one item would be given top priority, one item second priortiy and so forth.
OK, got it! Thanks!
I think is actually asking you number your choice from 1 to 6, not rating it rows.
I ran through that Zagat survey and found it woefully short on meaningful data. I wanted to see more than a Top 5. How about a Top 25…especially for International Airlines?
What was kind of surprising is in the Additional Questions section how little fluctuation there’s been the past four years on just about every data field listed.
Re Zagat… interesting mix of apples and oranges that they are comparing. Looking at the Best Frequent Flier program winners, it just doesn’t make much sense assuming the participants of the survey are predominately from the US.
So if we take this qualitatively, basically United needs to leverage the Continental service and culture while integrating the fleet. United has a strong product but needs a better brand. (Surprising cause when I was a kid, I thought United was like the best airline ever, although I might be biased growing up in the DC area)
What these surveys need to be focusing on are most improved airlines (i.e. the airlines that we should give a second chance to and try flying them again). Alitalia is one of them. Aeroflot is also in this category. Even Garuda. Otherwise you’re always going to have Singapore winning its awesomeness award, Southwest and JetBlue winning cause of no bag fees, and Hawaiian winning best on-time performance.
I think you’re right about the United/Continental deal. It’s not just you being in DC – as a west coast kid, United was always up at the top as well. The brand (or really lack thereof) has suffered a lot over the years.
On your second point, yes most improved is important, but then again you see new entrants like Virgin America toward the top, so it is possible to breakthrough. Even look at an airline like Air New Zealand which 10 years ago was about to go under.