Monthly Airplane Wi-Fi Report Card: January 2019
As a business traveler, the single most important benefit when I’m on a flight is reliable, fast Wi-fi. A comfortable seat is nice, especially if there’s room for me to work on my laptop. Food and drink really are immaterial. Movies and TV shows? I’ve got my own in the rare case I actually don’t have enough work to do. It all comes down to Wi-Fi.
I didn’t start out 2019 with this project in mind. Then, United Airlines just completely bombed on working Wi-Fi. So, I started tracking all of my flights and when Wi-Fi worked. Now, we have to have a reasonable definition of “working”. Here’s mine. I need to be able to send and receive e-mails for the lion’s share of a flight. I’ve had a few United Airlines’ flights where I could text periodically though not quickly. That doesn’t come close to meeting the standard of productivity.
United Airlines typically takes a while to for Wi-Fi to get working. Other airlines like Delta that still feature planes with the older Gogo systems typically don’t work under 10,000 feet. I expect that internet will work within 20 minutes of take-off and work until roughly 20 minutes left in the flight. I might be willing to stretch that to a lost hour of connectivity, especially on a longer flight. But, I haven’t been in that position yet.
I had some of these stats wrong when I was tweeting about it, so I thought it best to start recording it on a monthly basis. I’ll go back through my flight history each month and keep going until the numbers aren’t interesting anymore (airlines fix their Wi-Fi).
Here’s my stats for January, 2019:
United Airlines: 2 working flights out of 7 (28.5%)
Southwest Airlines: 1 working flight out of 2 (50%)
Air Canada: 1 working flight out of 1 (100%)
Delta Air Lines: 1 working flight out of 1 (100%)
The Final Two Pennies
The point that the airlines miss (United Airlines, specifically) is that they believe they can refund the money from a failed Wi-Fi session and repair any damage to the relationship with their customer. I currently fly most regularly on United Airlines because they have the most nonstop flights from my home airport of Washington-Dulles. Based on their Wi-Fi performance in January, and a continuation of the same trend on my flights in early February, I’m actively considering booking away from United until this problem gets better. I won’t sacrifice time away from my family, but I will consider taking connecting flights with efficient connecting times on an airline with more reliable Wi-Fi.
Stay tuned for another update in February.
What has your experience been with W-Fi in the air lately?
Did you enjoy this post? Please share it! There’s plenty of ways to do that below.
You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
And, I hope you’ll check out my podcast, Miles To Go. We cover the latest travel news, tips and tricks every week so you can save money while you travel better. From Disney to Dubai, San Francisco to Sydney, American Airlines to WestJet, we’ve got you covered!
I often depend on inflight wifi to get work done and like many others it’s frustrating that in todays tech world it just doesn’t work well. I just came off four UA flights and frankly found their’s to work much better than Alaska’s same provider Go Go but it just seemed to work better and yes the two of the four flights were within the flight plates of Alaska,
Your sample really does not provide any real data as it’s very limited would suggest you to this for the next six months and maybe we’ll see some real facts
Ghostrider, agree it’s a small sample size but needed to start somewhere. While I didn’t keep track last year, United was slightly less atrocious but still pretty darn bad.
Sounds about right. I’ve had very few flights on United with “working” WiFi. I will say that I ALWAYS complain after the fact and they always refund me. Course I’d rather it just worked.
Glenn, that’s the thing. The refund is meaningless when compared with the lost productivity.
I’ve had fantastic response with United and WiFi, but it has always been on international routes. Once we hit domestic it is almost non-functional.
Paul, different service on intl. My experience has generally been good on international UA flights as well. Domestic, not so much.