'Air New Zealand world's 10th most loved airline'

NZ Herald

21 Feb, 2016 01:31 AM3 mins to read

The survey by a Florida research company analysed 1.3 million tweets mentioning 70 world airlines. Photo / Supplied

It's computer-generated and it's based on analysing tweets, but a new survey has found that Air New Zealand is the world's tenth most loved airline.

The survey by a Florida research company for US charter airline Stratos analysed 1.3 million tweets mentioning 70 world airlines between November 20 and January 9.

It "ran a sampling of the electronic conversations through a sentiment analysis algorithm to determine how positive or negative passengers felt about an airline".

Korean Air topped the resulting league table with a score of +0.57 on a scale running from +1 (only positive comments) to -1 (only negative comments).

Air New Zealand came tenth on +0.43, behind Canadian airline Air North, German budget carrier TUfly, TAP Portugal, Air France, Singapore budget airline Tiger, British carrier Monarch, Icelandair and Romania's Tarom.

Australian-owned rival Jetstar came eighth from the bottom, scoring -0.05, only slightly better than worst-placed Spirit Airlines, a Florida-based budget airline, on -0.15.

Most common complaints were 66,831 tweets about flights that were late, delayed or cancelled. Another 16,272 people tweeted about lost baggage.

The most common positive tweet was simply "thank you", occurring in 101,798 tweets.

Aviation commentator Peter Clark said the results should be "taken with a grain of salt" because legacy airlines operating regular scheduled flights, such as Air NZ, were in a different business from charter companies such as Air North. He noted that the top 10 included only two big legacy carriers, Korean Air and Air France.

"I do consider Korean Air a very good airline, but you have to look at the different psychology of the people who fly on that. Koreans are very modest and a very different type of passenger than other airlines," he said.

"I would actually consider Air NZ to be higher up the scale, but when you consider the airlines that are in front of it, I don't consider that this is a really fair look across carriers."

Air NZ head of global brand development Jodi Williams said Air NZ was "thrilled to be punching above its weight in the social media space globally".

"A lot of our success has been driven through conversations and true interaction with our NZ and global audiences," she said.

"Twitter is also one of our top customer service channels, so we make every effort to ensure our customers receive quick, efficient help when and where they need it."