Addled Statistics

Tuesday, November 02, 2010

From today’s Toronto Star :

“Pearson named worst airport in Canada”.

It all depends, as by now you know, on one’s definition of “worst” or even “best”.

Me, I live right under the flight path and love watching the Big Birds float overhead on their way to touchdown on 33L.

More flights would just make YYZ even better, from my point of view.

But Naman Budhdeo, CEO of FlightNetwork.com thinks differently.

About numbers.

The Toronto Star report states its finding as percentages, as in “The number one gripe, at 18 per cent, was bad service”, and that’s after saying that 800 Canadians (not travelers!) were polled.

Naman’s refutation is “It makes sense that Pearson would have the highest vote for ‘worst’ airport based on the fact that it is Canada’s busiest airport.”.

Wrong. Utterly wrong.

You can doubt the reports based on too-small a sample size (which was not done), but you can’t refute percentage claims with absolute quantity terms.

If anything, YYZ being Canada’s busiest airport should be yielding a better sample. YYZ ought to have a better class of passengers, better in terms of better educated (business types with MBAs or just international travelers from Holland and Singapore who have experienced different airports around the world).

Who is FlightNetwork.com?

From their web site: "Why have I never heard about Flight Network? … all of our visitors and customers have come to our site mainly via search engines or other websites. … you've never seen us in print ads or heard our name on TV or the radio.”

But now they have branched out into free publicity via a print ad cunningly disguised as a news story in a large city newspaper.

“Last year alone, approximately half the population of Canada visited our website at least once.”

I doubt this, since we are discussing numeric facts.

I doubt that half the population of Canada uses the internet, and I certainly doubt that half the population of Canada uses the internet to research flights. Even more do I doubt that half the population of Canada uses the internet to research flights on FlightNetwork.com.

But they wish!

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