AIR TRAVEL CONSUMER PROTECTION: A METRIC FOR PASSENGER ON- TIME PERFORMANCE

The raison d’etre for the national Air Transportation System (ATS) is the movement of passengers and cargo. As a consequence, passenger trip time performance is positively correlated with passenger satisfaction, airfare elasticity, and airline profits. Regulatory consumer information available to airline passengers provides measures of trip performance using the percentage of on-time flights (e.g. 15-OTP metric). Researchers have shown that these “flight-based” metrics are poor proxies for passenger trip time performance. First these metrics do not include the trip delays accrued by passengers rebooked due to cancelled flights (which accounts for 40% of the overall passenger trip delays). Second, the metric does not quantify the magnitude of the delay (only the likelihood) and thus fails to provide the consumer with a useful assessment of the impact of a delay (such as missed connections on next mode of transportation). This paper describes a new consumer protection metric (Expected Value of Passenger Trip Delay – EV-PTD) that accounts for: (i) cancelled flights, and (ii) both the probability of delay and the magnitude of the delay. The EV-PTD for all 1030 routes between OEP-35 airports in 2005 ranged from 11.5 minutes (best) to 155 minutes (worst). The average route EV-PTD was 35 minutes. By treating passenger trip delay as a random variable it can be shown that the transportation process is not a “fair” game and that passengers and service providers (e.g. airlines, air traffic control, airports) cannot “beat” the system until the variance is significantly reduced. The implications of these results and the use of the EV-PTD metric by consumers for purchasing tickets and for consumer protection are discussed.