In the clouds - the terms most commonly used to describe some of the world's most popular airlines

7 January, 2019

All travellers have a preference of airline they would rather fly, hotel they would rather stay, even airport they would prefer to use. Even when it comes to destinations, we all have our own opinions on the positives and negatives. Opinions can be very different and can be impacted by service, price, efficiency etc.

That is why this study from US Packaging & Wrapping is very interesting. The packaging supply company has collated thousands of customer reviews (sourced from TripAdvisor, Trustpilot and Skytrax) and illustrated them as word cloud visualisations to highlight the words most commonly used to describe some of the world's most popular airlines.

Overall the findings appear fairly positive, albeit the data does yield some intriguing results. US carrier United Airlines was found to have the highest percentage of negative comments (34%) amongst the top terms collated for the analysed operators with just 43% deemed positive terms. This compares with the 73% seen by Emirates Airline, the carrier with the highest percentage of positive words.

We bring special mention to Southwest Airlines following the death of its founder Herb Kelleher late last week. The man behind the popular rising of the LCC model across USA, and its expansion across the globe, was well respected for motivating and empowering his staff to deliver a customer service ethos. The words 'friendly, 'good', 'great', 'best' and 'love' stand out clearly in its word cloud.

The appearance of words such as 'good', 'great' and 'excellent' are a recurring theme among the airlines featured, albeit each has its own clear idiosyncrasies. Here are all the word clouds produced by US Packaging & Wrapping with statistics highlighting a breakdown of the 50 most common terms (positive to negative ratio)...

Air France - Positive: 50% Neutral: 26% Negative: 24%

American Airlines - Positive: 45% Neutral: 22% Negative: 33%

British Airways - Positive: 50% Neutral: 29% Negative: 21%

China Southern Airlines - Positive: 59% Neutral: 27% Negative: 14%

Delta Air Lines - Positive: 61% Neutral: 29% Negative: 10%

easyJet - Positive: 44% Neutral: 34% Negative: 22%

Emirates Airline - Positive: 73% Neutral: 20% Negative: 7%

Lufthansa - Positive: 65% Neutral: 20% Negative: 15%

Southwest Airlines - Positive: 71% Neutral: 23% Negative: 6%

United Airlines - Positive: 43% Neutral: 23% Negative: 34%