Airports, Airlines, Aviation

Top Travel Brands


Diffbot recently put together a cool interactive infographic, highlighting the top travel brands by a variety of clever metrics. In this blog we’ll take a look at the findings.

The first thing the infographic focused on was Airlines, as measured by the number of mentions on social media channels (but not the usual suspects).

Top Travel Brands - Airlines
Top Travel Brands – Airlines

I found a few things interesting in this assessment. First of all, the typical social media channels – Twitter and Facebook – actually weren’t used in this assessment, which is what most companies tend to monitor to figure out sentiment about their travel brand. For this study, aggregate mentions on forums and comment sections on the web were considered, which allows for more freedom of expression than the typical 140 character Tweet.

What we see above is that United got the top number of mentions, with American Airlines second. However, even at second, brand fans tended to write more verbosely when talking about American than about United. This signals to me that American has more passionate travel brand fans. Lufthansa and British Airways fared the worse, with both the fewest number of mentions, and the shortest mentions when mentioned.

The next section of the infographic focuses on the specific relationship of a travel brand fan with the airline brand. The same airlines were analyzed, resulting in the following chart showing where consumer sentiment lies across the Negative – Neutral – Positive spectrum:

Airline travel brands love hate
Airline travel brands love hate

Here, even though previously it seemed that the number of mentions and comment length might lead to travel brand advocates, this is in fact not the case. Longer comments might actually mean more complaints, as both American Airlines and United come in the lower half of analyzed sentiment – both are just above a “neutral” brand assessment.

And which airline did the best? No surprise, Alaska Airlines. That matches up with what we wrote about earlier in 2015, when we rolled up passenger satisfaction and on-time performance from the Airline Quality Rating 2015 survey across airline travel brands.

Branvo once again, Alaska Airlines.

If you want to keep reading to learn about more travel brands than just airlines, check out the Diffbot link here.


One response to “Top Travel Brands”

  1. […] Top Travel Brands. Diffbot recently put together a cool interactive infographic, highlighting the top travel brands by a variety of clever metrics. In this blog we’ll take a look at the findings. The interesting thing about this infographic is that it measures the most talked about airlines by the number of mentions on some rather unusual social media channels. Read more here. […]

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