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.