Forbes, the 100+-year-old business magazine, offers a lot of lists every year. Here are a few of them:
- The Billionaire List (Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bernard Arnault & Family, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg took the Top 5 positions when the most recent list came out).
- The World’s Most Innovative Companies (ServiceNow, Workday, Salesforce.com, Tesla and Amazon.com were the Top 5 this year)
- The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women (MacKenzie Scott, Kamala Harris, Christine Lagarde, Mary Barra and Melinda French Gates were most recently at the top)
If you click here, you can see all their other lists. There are dozens of them, that run the gamut from business to education to sports to employers. So what’s one more list, right?
This is the inaugural year of Forbes’ “Halo 100” list. It’s composed of “the companies creating brands that consumers love” and highlights excellence (read: how well and how responsibly) in making good on what customers want to have.
From Forbes:
To do this, we partnered with HundredX, a Dallas-based data and analytics company that has developed an innovative way of collecting customer experience feedback. Consumers select up to 75 brands that matter to them from more than 2,000 options and share their opinions and experience with those brands; HundredX gives money to their favorite charity in return. The goal, says founder Rob Pace, is “to measure the outcomes you’re creating for customers versus their other options.” The list is the result of feedback from 110,000 customers on more than 2.8 million interactions with different brands over the past year, giving us insight into who’s doing well across different demographics.
The Top 5 of the Halo 100 are the brand names you wouldn’t be surprised seeing on a list of “companies that customers love”:
- Costco
- In-N-Out Burger
- Chick-fil-A
- Publix Super Markets
- Trader Joe’s
If you continue down the list, you don’t get to a travel company until #8 – Marriott. #Bonvoyed or no #Bonvoyed, Marriott has its share of superfans, for sure.
Following Marriott, you have to go all the way down to #28 until you get to another travel company – Southwest Airlines.
Hilton is the next travel company, at #37.
After that, Hyatt comes in at #61, Royal Caribbean is #68, JetBlue topped out at #87 and Delta (the only legacy airline on the list) at #90. Oh, and not travel companies per se (so I didn’t include them in my count), but points and miles people well know how they’re used in conjunction with travel – Visa credit cards came in at #60 and Chase was #79.
You can click here for the whole list.
So of 100 companies, there were only 3 hotel companies, 3 airlines and 1 cruise line. Considering how much people travel, that’s just…wow.
Forbes doesn’t mention in their methodology when they surveyed the 110,000 customers who took part in the survey, other than “during the past year.” But consider what’s happened since Covid – both airlines and hotels made significant cuts in what they offer, several airlines had massive meltdowns that affected thousands upon thousands of people, etc. As Forbes suggested, trust and brand values are a core part of the calculation in how consumers feel about brands. I wouldn’t be surprised if the travel industry is not necessarily the most trusted industry right now.
It will be interesting to see if and how the lists changes over the years, as COVID becomes less of the narrative and airlines and hotel continue to evolve (for the better? For the worse? Who knows?).
Feature Photo: Pixabay
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