Dean Headley - Airline quality expert at your service
By Joe Kleinsasser
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The Airline Quality Rating
Airline industry continues descent Overall airline quality continues to slide and reversing the trend won’t be easy, according to Dean Headley, WSU researcher and co-author of the AQR. "The demand for flying is only going to continue to go up about 3 or 4 percent a year. If we continue on that pace, in about 10 years we’re going to hit 1 billion travelers inside the United States – that’s just people flying domestically. If that’s the case, without capacity improvements, we’re going to have every day at the airport looking like the Wednesday before Thanksgiving," Headley says. Other major findings reported in the AQR include:
The full report is available online at http://cid.unomaha.edu/~unoai. - Joe Kleinsasser |
When the media or consumers want an unbiased view on airline service, whom do they call? More often than not, they call Dean Headley at Wichita State, fittingly enough located in the Air Capital of the World.
In a span of one month recently, Headley, associate professor of marketing, was flown to Toronto and to New York City for television interviews on airline quality issues. The latter interview was for the popular ABC program "20/20." He’s also been interviewed live on NBC’s "Today" show twice.
Headley’s acclaim as an airline quality expert extends to the print media, too. The annual Airline Quality Rating, which was announced earlier this week in a news conference in Washington, D.C., regularly receives coverage in newspapers across the country, from The New York Times to USA Today.
The making of the AQR
The idea for the AQR began in fall 1990. Headley and Brent Bowen, who was on the WSU faculty at the time, noticed that no one had devised a rating system for commercial airlines. Headley’s research area is in quality measurement, and Bowen’s is in aviation management.
Their timing was good. A couple of years earlier, the U.S. Department of Transportation started the "Air Travel Consumer Report," which reports public data on airline performance.
What makes the AQR so unique? "We are still the first and only rating system that deals exclusively with actual airline performance," says Headley.
"All the other ratings and rankings deal with some type of a large customer base perceptual survey. But nowhere, except through our rating, do you get a comprehensive look at how the airlines actually performed over a period of time. That’s been our principal hallmark all along."
The AQR basically looks at four major areas — on-time performance, involuntary denied boardings, mishandled baggage, and a range of consumer complaints.
The researchers use published data and a weighted average approach to study how the airlines perform over the course of a calendar year. Then they announce how each airline ranks in terms of overall quality for an entire year.
Headley says, "The rating method and the report get scrutinized in all manner of ways. It’s just amazing how many people look at this thing, and it’s always held up to academic and industry scrutiny as being valid."
Going from academic to mainstream
Headley and Bowen, now at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, never expected the media explosion the AQR created.
"Our basic intent was to write a paper for an academic publication. Being academics, journal articles are worth more than anything else," says Headley.
However, a casual conversation with a local Wichita television reporter 10 years ago led to ABC’s "Good Morning America" doing a consumer piece on the AQR and its potential usefulness.
After the story aired, Headley and Bowen spent the next two weeks answering phones.
Obviously, they had struck a chord.
The next year they announced the ratings at an academic conference they hosted — the first International Forum on Airline Quality in Washington, D.C.
After a press conference in March 1992 announcing the AQR results, they realized they had an annual event on their hands. Now they announce the AQR each April at the National Press Club.
"We learned that we go to the media. The media does not come to us," says Headley.
Some like it, others don’t
Of course, not everyone is enamored with the AQR. "The airlines tend not to like it simply because it puts their feet to the fire," says Headley. "The AQR is saying that this airline performed better than that airline, and while it may be small incremental differences, it’s still saying who is number one, two and three. Airline number one likes it and the rest don’t, basically."
Being ranked number one in an impartial study apparently means something. The top-ranked airline has frequently spent $500,000 or more on full-page advertisements in national newspapers like the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times and USA Today.
"When they do that they attribute the rating to the university so we get a bump out of that as well," says Headley.
"In fact when USAir was No. 1 in 1998 they also had 3-by-4-foot banners that said US Airways was ranked number one by the AQR and gave the universities’ names at the bottom. That banner was at every ticket counter and gate that they operate in the United States."
Reporters were initially skeptical as to motive, but Headley says it didn’t take long for them to see the value of the AQR. "We explained that we are doing this because we’re interested in consumer issues in the airline industry, no other reason."
Many in academia give it an ‘A’
"On the academic side you could say that we arrived when the inquiries started appearing from universities around the world," Headley says. "We’ve been able to present our method and concept at National Science Foundation panels. We’ve been asked to present this at four or five international forums on airlines because other countries are interested in adopting something like this."
The AQR also has been included in more than a dozen doctoral dissertations as a method for measuring the quality of airlines.
The industry is paying attention, too.
When American Airlines planned to announce a change that would affect the comfort of passengers, they informed Headley before the news conference.
"I thought ‘this is interesting,’" says Headley. "They felt it necessary or at least advantageous to call and let me know because they knew reporters were going to call me to talk about the issue."
Headley incorporates the AQR as much as possible in the classroom. He also uses it in guest lectures in entrepreneurship classes, in communications classes and in other marketing classes as a case in public relations and research based on secondary data.
"Some students don’t believe that it’s been reported in major media. I’ll bring the tape in and they’ll say, ‘Wow, that really was CNN.’"
The AQR is even included in one of the top marketing research textbooks in the country.
