The Most Reliable Airlines for Summer Travel Ranked

Are you hoping to get your long-awaited summer vacation underway as planned? Including your flight departing as scheduled (for those who are flying to their destination).

If that’s the case, you may want to select your airline carefully.

A new report from Only In Your State says late-arriving aircraft are the number one cause of summer travel delays, accounting for more than 41% of all delay minutes. Moreover, delays due to airline management are the cause of nearly 34.5% of delay time.

It’s worth noting, however, that the frequency of such problems varies significantly from one airline to the next. So to help summer travelers make more informed decisions, the Only In Your State team analyzed four summers of Department of Transportation (DOT) data across the 25 most popular U.S. routes to develop a ranking of the carriers that are the best and worst at getting passengers where they’re going as planned.

So, which airline should you turn to in order to have a more reliable experience?

It seems Hawaiian Airlines leads all carriers in the analysis, with the lowest delay rate (18.1% of flights) and the second-lowest cancellation rate (0.7%).

Frontier Airlines, meanwhile, had the worst on-time performance among major carriers, with more than one in three summer flights delayed (34.51%) and the highest cancellation rate (3.1%).

Here’s a closer look at the full ranking.

Most Reliable Airlines

While Hawaiian Airlines primarily serves flights to and from Hawaii (operating fewer than 30 routes worldwide), if a trip to the sun-soaked islands is on your radar, the good news is that your flight is likely to go smoothly.

The airlines’ limited scope appears to be a benefit when it comes to travel timing, as just 18.1% of Hawaiian Air flights experienced extended delays during the last four summer travel seasons, the lowest rate of any major airline.

Hawaiian Airlines is also one of just two airlines to cancel less than 1% of their summer flights in recent years. The other airline with a sub-1% cancellation rate is Alaska Airlines, another carrier with a more limited route network, though it serves nearly four times as many destinations as Hawaiian Airlines. Alaska also has one of the three lowest delay rates among airlines at 21.6%.

Rounding out the top five airlines for reliable performance are Delta, Southwest and Allegiant. Delta had a delay rate of 20.4%, while Southwest’s was 27%, followed by Allegiant at 30.4%. The percentages of flight cancellations for each airline are 2.2%, 1.1%, and 1.3%, respectively.

The report gives particular kudos to Delta for its reliable performance. “When it comes to companies with a broader scope of travel destinations, Delta leads the pack, with just 20.4% of its summer flights delayed from 2022 to 2025.

That's the second-lowest rate among airlines, regardless of size, which is particularly impressive given that Delta operated more than 1.6 million flights during that timeframe,” says the report. “Comparatively, Hawaiian and Alaska operated just 81,000 and 436,000 flights in that same four-summer stretch.”

Also among the top 10 for reliable performance are United (23.8% delay rate), American Airlines (27.1% delay rate), and JetBlue (33.3% delay rate).

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