The best airlines in the US for 2024

11.06.2024 - 23:51 / thepointsguy.com

Summer travel is kicking off in full force, and that can mean only one thing (aside from school ending, barbecues and packed flights to Europe): It's time to name TPG's Best Airline for 2024.

This year's rankings come as summer travel is expected to reach its highest level since 2019, if not its highest level ever.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans will be looking for airline tickets while considering details like price, service, reliability and, yes, frequent flyer points and miles.

Each traveler has their own set of preferences, but we still receive one type of question above nearly all others: Is any one airline in the U.S. the best? Does any one carrier succeed at all the things travelers really care about?

Every year, we compile thousands of objective data points to determine which of the 10 biggest U.S. airlines strikes the best balance of reliability, cost, experience and value. Our goal is to use a fair and unbiased approach to see how the airlines stack up for the average consumer.

This year's analysis is complete, and we're here with the results. Read on to see where your airline landed in this year's ratings

1. Delta Air Lines
2. Alaska Airlines
3. United Airlines
4. American Airlines
5. Southwest Airlines
6. JetBlue
7. Hawaiian Airlines
8. Allegiant Air
9. Spirit Airlines
10. Frontier Airlines

Keep reading for our full analysis and methodology — and to see what helped Delta top our rankings for the sixth year in a row.

Here's a quick breakdown of the overall scores this year, including the highest- and lowest-performing categories for each airline. We'll include last year's rank for each airline (in parentheses).

* All data was based on the 12-month period from Jan. 1 through Dec. 31, 2023, aside from customer satisfaction. Due to a reporting delay as the U.S. Department of Transportation changes its methodology for tracking complaints, this information is only available for the five-month period between Jan. 1 and May 31, 2023.

Key takeaways from this year's analysis include:

So, just how did these airlines fall where they did in the rankings? Read on for a closer look at each category we used to build these rankings, along with the weight we assigned to each. The full methodology is provided at the end of the report.

A lot goes into the overall air travel experience, from the moment you start searching for flights until you pick up your luggage from baggage claim and head out the airport door. But at the end of the day, an airline has one main job: to get you where you pay to go roughly on the schedule it promised.

Because of that, operational reliability is the largest single category in our rankings, weighted at 30% of our total analysis. We use five factors under the umbrella of