Tag: DL

  • Nate Silver’s 10-minute rule for lounges

    Nate Silver:

    With certain rare exceptions max you should wait for an airline lounge is probably 10 minutes, lotta sunk cost fallacy on display, and conditional on there being a wait it’s often more crowded and less pleasant inside than in increasingly nice public airport spaces.

    Silver was replying to yet another photo showing a long line outside a Delta club. Go to any of their hubs and you’ll see the same soon enough.

    I think they blew this aspect of the American Express deal. Even after limiting visits for most cardholders, there’s clearly still too many people with too much access. The Centurion lounges are also overcrowded.

    You can make the lounges bigger, but how much bigger, in how many places, and how many years later?

    Credit to American where it’s due: they have the right access policies in place. Charlotte aside, you rarely see lounges this crowded.

  • SkyTeam had the best on-time performance among top airlines in 2025

    Delta was the MVP in Cirium’s on-time performance rankings released yesterday. Here are the top 10 on-time airlines:

    • Aeromexico – 90%
    • Saudia – 87%
    • SAS – 86%
    • Azul – 85%
    • Qatar – 84%
    • Iberia – 84%
    • LATAM – 82%
    • Avianca – 82%
    • Turkish – 81%
    • Delta – 81%

    What makes Delta impressive is the volume: the airline ran 1.8 million flights and still made it into the top 10. The other nine airlines averaged roughly 300k flights each.

    The report lists the top 10 on-time airlines by region and their total completed flights, making it possible to calculate the on-time performance of each alliance among top airlines:

    • SkyTeam – 82% of 2.7m flights
    • Star Alliance – 79% of 3.7m flights
    • No alliance – 79% of 5.5m flights
    • oneworld – 78% of 4.0m flights

    The major factor, as always, is the US airlines, where American was the biggest player but also the slowest. On-time performance among major US airlines:

    • Delta – 81% of 1.8m flights
    • United – 79% of 1.7m flights
    • American – 76% of 2.2m flights

    (Alaska was on-time for 79% of their 453k flights, and credit to Spirit, which had the same on-time performance for their 218k flights.)