Airlines can improve travel efficiency and resilience by incorporating passenger-level data, study finds

LAWRENCE — Plane delays. It’s rare to spend a day traveling in an American airport without experiencing some form of disruption to a scheduled flight. 

While airlines and regulators track flight delays carefully, new research shows that publicly available airline performance metrics do not fully capture passengers’ actual travel experiences.

“Currently, they rely on flight-level data rather than passenger-level data, and that’s not providing 100% of the picture,” said Mazhar Arikan, associate professor of business and Anderson Family Fellow at the University of Kansas.

His new paper titled “The Role of Route-Level Decisions in the Efficiency and Resilience of Airline Operations: Evidence from the Wright Amendment Repeal” explores how modest adjustments in passenger itineraries, particularly reallocating a small proportion of connecting passengers with small itinerary buffers to alternative itineraries, could result in major travel improvements without significantly deteriorating efficiency. The research appears in Manufacturing & Service Operations Management.

“About 50% of passengers experience layovers. With flight-level data, you cannot actually tease out the passenger experience,” said Arikan, who co-wrote the paper with Vishal Ahuja of Southern Methodist University and Yasin Alan of Vanderbilt University.

“Let’s say your first flight is delayed and you miss your connecting flight — even though the next one leaves on time. Flight-level metrics would report a 50% on-time rate, but for the passenger, the trip is 100% delayed. Flight-level data alone cannot capture this critical passenger-level disruption.”

To analyze the impact of route-level changes, the authors developed two metrics. “Route inefficiency” measures how suboptimal travel times arise from longer distances or airport congestion, while “route resilience” refers to the likelihood that passengers experience long delays, capturing factors such as the frequency of available flights and the scheduled buffer times between connecting flights.

Partnering with Southwest Airlines allowed them to access data for about 20 million passengers from airports in both Dallas and Houston over a three-year period. These particular airports were chosen due to the Wright Amendment, a federal law enacted in 1979 to limit long-haul flights from Dallas Love Field and protect the newly built Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport. The Wright Amendment represented a regulatory compromise: Southwest could continue operating from Love Field but with restrictions that legally prevented the airline from offering nonstop flights to longer-distance destinations.

“The Wright Amendment was repealed in 2014, so that allowed Southwest to finally offer such flights. It also created a type of natural experiment: We could look at this event and observe what happened before and what happened after,” he said.

Houston Hobby Airport was chosen as the researchers’ control airport, based on its similar geography, size, weather and the absence of regulatory changes similar to the Wright Amendment repeal. 

“By using the control airport, we were able to have a good comparable estimate of the consequences of this repeal,” Arikan said.

His study suggests airline managers should consider both the efficiency and resilience impact of their decisions in order to obtain a more comprehensive view of their operational implications.

Arikan wrote, “Route-level changes (e.g., introducing nonstop service between two airports) can benefit some passengers (destinations) while disadvantaging others by triggering other changes (e.g., reducing flight frequencies to airports previously used for connections). Therefore, airline managers should look beyond a focal origin-destination pair to have a more complete assessment of the impact of a route-level decision on their entire passenger pool.”

Additionally, he noted that for managers and regulators, the study highlights the monetary value of passenger travel-time reductions.

“Whenever policymakers implement regulatory changes affecting the processes or operations of airlines or other companies, there can be unintended negative consequences. But this paper shows that once such restrictions are lifted, conditions often improve significantly,” he said. 

A native of Turkey, Arikan is an expert in airline operations/scheduling and supply chain economics. He’s been specifically studying airline efficiencies since graduate school. 

“Whenever I speak with anybody about what I do, they will share an experience about flying on an airline,” said Arikan, who’s been a faculty member at KU since 2011.

The professor hopes the managerial implications of this research can benefit both the industry and its customers.

“If you look at airline rankings, some airlines appear good, some appear not as good. Yet these rankings may not truly reflect the actual passenger experience,” Arikan said.

“We are grateful airlines are publishing flight-level data. But I think this paper will give policymakers a proof of concept that if they make passenger-level data publicly available, it will create a nice even playing field, a nice competitive environment for airlines.”