Air travel is one of the most frequently used means of transportation in our every-day life. Thus, it is not surprising that an increasing number of travelers share their experiences with airlines and airports in form of online reviews on the Web. In this work, we thrive to explain and uncover the features of airline reviews that contribute most to traveler satisfaction. To that end, we examine reviews crawled from the Skytrax air travel review portal. Skytrax provides four review categories to review airports, lounges, airlines and seats. Each review category consists of several five-star ratings as well as free-text review content. In this paper, we conducted a comprehensive feature study and we find that not only five-star rating information such as airport queuing time and lounge comfort highly correlate with traveler satisfaction but also textual features in the form of the inferred review text sentiment. Based on our findings, we created classifiers to predict traveler satisfaction using the best performing rating features. Our results reveal that given our methodology, traveler satisfaction can be predicted with high accuracy. Additionally, we find that training a model on the sentiment of the review text provides a competitive alternative when no five star rating information is available. We believe that our work is of interest for researchers in the area of modeling and predicting user satisfaction based on available review data on the Web.
Outstanding service organizations focus on customers and frontline workers. The service-profit chain puts hard values on soft measures, helping managers quantify their investments in people and then integrate those measures into a comprehensive service picture. This study aimed to examine the effects of aspects of airline service quality, such as airline tangibles, terminal tangibles, and empathy on levels of customer satisfaction. The relationship between these levels of satisfaction and the general perceptions about service quality were also investigated. An airline passenger survey was conducted among the population of the Federal Territory of Labuan, Malaysia. A total of 300 respondents who had regularly patronized either Malaysia Airlines or AirAsia over the last six months were selected via convenience sampling method. Empirical results via structural equation modeling (SEM) approach revealed that the relationship between customer satisfaction with airline service quality and ‘word-of-mouth’ recommendations is a consistent one. Furthermore, customer satisfaction is widely influenced by empathy, which is why flight punctuality and good transportation links between city venues and airports are prioritized by providers. Direction for future research is presented. Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine consumer perceptions of airline quality indicators and compare them to actual data reported by the Department of Transportation, in the USA and the Association of European Airlines (AEA) in the EU. The objective is to determine whether there is a discrepancy between reported performance metrics of service quality and consumer perception.Design methodology approach – This paper compares actual reported data on service quality with results of an exploratory questionnaire on the perceived frequency of service failures in three key areas of airline service quality; on time flight arrivals, baggage reports and flight cancellations. Similarities and differences both within and between the USA and EU markets are discussed.Findings – Preliminary findings indicate that actual consumer perceptions of airline performance on key areas of airline service quality are in fact far worse than the data reported in the US Air Travel Consumer Report or AEA Consumer Report. Co... This paper examines the key factors that determine business traveler loyalty toward full-service airlines in China. Based on literature review and panel interview, ten airline attributes under three categories were derived: (a) operational factors: safety, punctuality, and aircraft; (b) competitive factors: frequency of flights, schedule, frequent flyer program, ticket price, and reputation; and (c) attractive factors: in flight food & drinks and in flight staff service. We surveyed 2000 Chinese business travelers on domestic flights, obtaining 462 usable questionnaires. Hierarchical regression analysis reveals that reputation, in-flight service, frequent flyer program, and aircraft have the greatest influence in driving airline loyalty.  