Revealed: America’s Best (And Worst) Airlines
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Revealed: America’s Best (And Worst) Airlines
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By Robert Williams, Founder
Thank God for angry airline passengers.
I’m talking about the folks PO’d enough to vent about it on Twitter (TWTR).
“Hey #UnitedAirlines… you really suck!”
“Those #AmericanAirlines losers canceled my flight!”
As it turns out, those tweets can be infinitely valuable to your portfolio.
So valuable, in fact, that they can double the performance of the benchmark average.
Twitter Mining Reveals America’s Best – And Worst – Airlines
Luminoso, a text analysis company, just did something wonderfully ambitious . . . It analyzed the social media mentions of five airlines – United Airlines (UAL), JetBlue (JBLU), Delta Airlines (DAL), Virgin America, and American Airlines (AAL) – during the month of August. (August just happens to be among the busiest travel months of the year.) The company parsed more than 157,000 tweets, cataloging them by relevant keywords like “delays,” “cancellations,” or “luggage.” Now, remember . . . angry people are far more likely to publicly vent about bad experiences than happy people are to boast about pleasant ones. (You know you’re guilty!) Nonetheless, Virgin America had the most positive responses, winning the Twitter war in key areas like customer service, and fewer delays and cancellations. The dog with fleas among the group – well, at least according to the tweets – is United Airlines, which seems to specialize in exasperating and tormenting its passengers.
Happy Customers, Happy Shareholders . . .
Boy, what a lesson this was in the value of the customer experience! Look what happens when you measure the stock performance of the publicly traded airline that Twitter says is tops – JetBlue – alongside the worst, United Airlines. (I had to use JetBlue because the true Twitter champion, Virgin America, hasn’t IPO’d yet.)
Buying shares of the fans’ favorite would’ve resulted in an additional 20% to your ROI over the course of a year.
When measured against the entire transportation sector – as represented by the iShares Transportation Average (IYT) ETF – JetBlue more than doubled the return. And since airlines only represent a small percentage of the ETF’s holdings, it demonstrates how airlines, in general, are enjoying a banner year.