An airline journey is a chain of handoffs between separately managed teams — reservations, check-in, security liaison, lounge, gate, cabin, arrivals, baggage. Measuring one link tells you very little about the journey the passenger actually had, and most airline service data is collected link by link.
The end-to-end evaluation
A full evaluation books, flies and lands, scoring each stage against its own criteria and then scoring the handoffs between them. The handoffs are where the interesting failures live: a passenger told one thing at check-in and another at the gate has experienced one airline, and neither team's own metrics will show it.
What is measurable before departure
- Booking: time to complete, clarity of fare conditions, whether ancillaries were presented with their cost and their actual benefit
- Changes and cancellations, which is where the fare conditions are actually tested
- Check-in: queue against the published standard, document handling, seat and baggage handling
- Special assistance where requested, and whether the request survived from booking to gate
- Lounge access, condition and food service where applicable
- Boarding: the gap between announced and actual boarding time, and whether any delay was communicated before a passenger asked
In the cabin
Cabin criteria have to be observable from a seat and comparable between shoppers. Greeting on boarding, cabin condition at departure, the sequence and timing of service, whether a special meal ordered at booking actually arrived, crew response to a call bell, and lavatory condition checked at a defined point in the flight rather than whenever the shopper happened to go.
What cannot be scored from a seat is anything requiring operational knowledge — turnaround performance, load, crew rostering. Programmes that ask a shopper to infer those produce confident nonsense.
Arrival and baggage
Arrival is the stage most often left out and it is the one that colours the memory of the journey. Time from door to first bag on the belt, time to last bag, whether a delay was announced, and how a missing bag was handled where the scenario reaches that far.
Cabin class as a separate instrument
Economy, premium and business are different products with different promises and they need different scorecards. Running one instrument across all three produces a score that flatters the front of the aircraft and penalises the back for not being it.
The competitor leg
The comparison worth having is not against last quarter. It is against the two carriers a passenger was choosing between on the same route in the same week. That means flying them on the same instrument, which is the expensive part of the programme and usually the part that produces the finding a network acts on.