Because there is often a considerable amount of downtime waiting for your plane to take-off and land, it's no wonder that many of us have taken to using our cell phones or mobile devices to tweet out our frustrations (or pleasure) with the status of our journey through the sky.
Perhaps that's why an analysis and study by Dolores Labs and PeopleBrowser and led by Brian Solis interested us. The two companies teamed up to see what airlines had the largest percentage of recently satisfied customers (based on Twitter data). The results are pretty interesting:
It's important to note that this sentiment analysis isn't entirely error proof. By searching tweets for the name of an airline and positive or negative words, overall sentiment can be determined, but the results are far from perfect. For instance, Aloha Airlines ranked highest on the list, but they no longer exist and it seems many of the tweets might have been completely unrelated to the airline.
Still, the data is fascinating. In general, larger carriers had more negative tweets than smaller carriers like Virgin. The one exception to this rule was Southwest, which had about a 85% positive sentiment rating, despite being a larger carrier. Words like "upgrade" and "rocks" and "internet" were common in the positive sentiment tweets, while words like "fail," "sucks" and "delay" were highly represented in the negative sentiment tweets. Incidentally, NorthWest had the lowest percentage of positive tweets.