I really hate stuff like this. Bad things happen some percentage of the time when you're doing any thing complicated. And the sort of paradox is that in a large enough sample, rare events happen all the time.
Air travel is pretty close to commodotized now. Yes, Spirit is "worse" than the rest (although I admire their fee structure and their transparency around it, honestly) and Southwest is probably the best (information that does me no good on most of the routes I fly, unfortunately). But past that, differences between airlines are incredibly marginal. And yet, people find patterns in the noise, and if they've had a bad experience with an airline, they tend to dislike them, no matter that most airlines have roughly the same level of delays and cancellations, and all of them have the same awful customer service.
Plus, if you're not flying between two hub cities, you're likely flying on a regional carrier that has American Airline livery on the planes but is a separate company:
Air travel is pretty close to commodotized now. Yes, Spirit is "worse" than the rest (although I admire their fee structure and their transparency around it, honestly) and Southwest is probably the best (information that does me no good on most of the routes I fly, unfortunately). But past that, differences between airlines are incredibly marginal. And yet, people find patterns in the noise, and if they've had a bad experience with an airline, they tend to dislike them, no matter that most airlines have roughly the same level of delays and cancellations, and all of them have the same awful customer service.
Plus, if you're not flying between two hub cities, you're likely flying on a regional carrier that has American Airline livery on the planes but is a separate company:
https://www.aa.com/i18n/customer-service/about-us/american-a...