Gird your loins, as Stanley Tucci's character declared in The Devil Wears Prada. The holiday travel season is fast approaching.
It's rarely a pleasant experience to travel during the Thanksgiving season or the winter holiday, which stretches from just before Christmas through the days after New Year's. But you can pick your airline based on its on-time arrival performance.
FORBES looked at the performance of 12 major U.S. airlines for the past three years during those two periods, with help from Rian Bosse, a graduate student at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.
We charted on-time arrivals as tracked by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. (See all the BTS data here.) We focused on when planes arrive at the gate rather than when they depart, since pilots often can make up time in the air if planes leave late.
This year, we counted American Airlines and US Airways as one airline, and
During the past three years, the dozen airlines' on-time arrival record was 76.6 percent. (Note: the Department of Transportation defines on-time as reaching the gate less than 15 minutes after the scheduled arrival time. That is a standard that some argue is too loose and makes the airlines' performance look better than it really is.)
Put another way, by the official statistics, almost one quarter of holiday flights arrived behind schedule.
Some airlines, however, did much better than that.
The best-performing airline during the Thanksgiving and winter holiday periods over the past three years is Hawaiian Airlines. It's the only airline whose flights arrived promptly more than 90 percent of the time, with just 9.2 percent late.
It's a repeat performance for Hawaiian, which has perennially taken the top spot in numerous FORBES on-time rankings through the years.
Unfortunately, Frontier Airlines also repeats as the bottom-ranking airline. Just 65.8 percent of its flights were on time during the holiday periods, meaning that almost one out of three ran late.
Winter weather is a large factor in Frontier's performance. Unlike the sunny skies that often greet Hawaiian's flights, Denver-based Frontier has to grapple with stormy weather at its home base, and it flies to a lot of destinations where snow and ice are regular events.
In fact, Denver has already faced rough weather this fall, causing numerous delays and cancellations, as well as school closings.
The next best among the top five airlines for holiday flying is
Among the bottom performers, the second-worst airline in the survey this year is Envoy Air, which travelers know best as American Eagle. Its flights arrived late 32 percent of the time during the holiday periods we examined.
Another regional carrier, ExpressJet, is third worst with an on-time arrival rate of 72.2 percent. In fact, regional carriers often have a tough time staying on time. They fly smaller aircraft, at lower altitudes, and are affected most by rough weather.
Full List: The Best and Worst Airlines for Holiday Travel, 2015
Here are some tips and things you should know to smooth your way during this year's holiday travel periods:
First, the Thanksgiving holiday actually has two big travel weekends. A number of people take off the entire holiday week, so travelers start to flood into airports on the Friday before Thanksgiving. Although you'd think Thanksgiving itself would be a slow travel day, it isn't, and don't expect bargain fares that day, either.
The Sunday after Thanksgiving is the single-busiest day of that travel period, not the day before Thanksgiving, and the traffic now often spills over into the Monday after Thanksgiving, and even to Tuesday.
This year, Christmas and New Year's Day each fall on Fridays. That means the winter holiday period will begin to ramp up a full week before Christmas, and you can bet on busy airports for the weekend after New Year's, and possibly into the following week.
You can find some tips on getting decent Thanksgiving fares here. And check out the TSA's tips for smooth holiday traveling here.
Above all, check weather reports, and give yourself plenty of time to check your bag, clear security and get to the gate. Don't be the cause of your own travel delays.
