Wisdom of Domestic Customers: An Empirical Analysis of the Turkish Private Airline Sector
Customer Satisfaction is one of the most important processes in airline industry and is recognized as key to the success of business competition which is the individual’s perception of the performance of the service in relation to expectations. Customers have drastically different expectations and, the objective of airline marketing efforts in today’s fast moving world is to maximize customer satisfaction. For this reason, airline marketers offer more products and services than ever before. In the airline industry understanding what passengers need and expect is essential to providing desired service quality (Gilbert & Wong, 2003) and consequently to understand the airline’s performance levels (Chen & Chang, 2005). An in-depth review of related literature has revealed that a majority of travel researchers tend to define quality as meeting passengers’ needs and expectations. Since customer expectations of service quality may vary at different stages in the service process, it has been strongly argued that in practice, most airlines measure passenger perceptions of their service offerings in order to evaluate and understand the airline's performance level without clear knowledge of passengers' expectations for service in each stage. Consequently, lack of understanding or misunderstanding such expectations could pose serious problems in resource allocation decisions. However, most airlines do not recognize the importance of this approach. Passengers’ expectations are among the factors influencing the service decisions of airlines. The primary objectives of this study are to determine customer expectations and satisfaction of private airline company service in Turkey. There is very limited literature on importance and satisfaction analysis private airline services. Based on a survey of 207 domestic passengers of four Turkish private airlines, this paper reveals passengers demographic profiles, behavioral characteristics, understanding of airline expectations and satisfaction levels with measured involve on twelve factors; convenience of schedules, on time performance, safety, types of airlines, price, comfort, food and drinks, personnel behavior, airline images, baggage services, flight network, cabin services.