American Worst at Answering Phones in Lead Up to Irene

According to the survey, the average call hold times of the 10 largest airlines during the hurricane were as follows:

1. U.S. Airways: 00:02:38
2. Southwest Airlines: 0:08:10
3. Continental Airlines: 00:08:15
4. United Airlines: 00:12:04
5. Spirit Airlines: 00:24:07
6. Jet Blue: 00:24:17
7. AirTran: 00:27:52
8. Frontier Airlines: 00:29:54
9. Delta: 00:33:43
10. American Airlines: 01:32:39

In the social media sphere, JetBlue (Stock Quote:  JBLU) also shined, answering 83.3% of tweets in an average of 11 seconds. Frontier Airlines answered 100% of its tweets, but took an average of 4 minutes and 4 seconds to do so. United (Stock Quote:  UAL), like American, did not respond to tweets at all.

StellaService initially said that both United (Stock Quote:  UAL) and American Airlines did not respond to tweets at all. However, it has since changed United Airlines’ Twitter response rate from a 0% to a 58% after discovering that the questions had been posed to a Twitter handle that had been de-activated after United and Continental merged.

"Had we not answered the questions they tweeted to our inactive @continental handle, we would have replied to the questions they tweeted to our active @United handle, just as we replied to more than 200 other customer inquiries on Twitter," a spokesperson for the airline said.

StellaService also removed American from its Twitter rankings for similar reasons.

You can find a complete list of the airlines’ Twitter performance on StellaService’s blog.

StellaService said it stands by all other findings from the study.

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