A Study on identifying hidden factors associated with customer satisfaction levels of an airline

Abstract

Air transportation plays an important role in the modern world as it is the easiest way to travel to any part of the world within a very short period of time. With the increasing number of passengers travelling through airlines, new airline companies have evolved with time. Due to the high competitiveness among the airline companies, retaining the existing customers seems a challenging task. Among such strategies, identifying the reasons behind their customers’ priorities for their choice of airline plays an important facet. This study is based on feedback of the passengers for a “Service and Performance Survey” conducted by a certain airline company. Among the few customer satisfaction survey results that have been published, possibly due to the confidentiality, the analyses are mainly based on descriptive analysis. This study was carried out to find out hidden factors or characteristics of the customers that are associated with their satisfaction level using Latent Class Analysis which was not done in the previously literature. The passengers were classified based their satisfaction levels and it was found out that the airline company has achieved their desired satisfaction level of 80% their passengers only to few attributes like crew friendliness, crew efficiency, overall crew satisfaction level, cabin lighting and cabin cleanliness. Inflight entertainment attributes (choice of movies, video quality, choice of music, headset quality and choice of newspaper/magazine) have very low satisfaction levels compared to other onboard services and must be improved a lot. More choices of meals should be provided and special attention should be paid for the choices of meals for the air planes taking more Middle Eastern people.