A consumer perspective of service quality in the airline industry

The airline Service quality has received much attention from both academicians and practitioners. Various studies have used SERVQUAL, AIRQUAL, the Kana Model, etc. for measuring the customer service quality in the airline industry. However, a review of the airline service quality literature shows a lack of research about the use of latent semantic analysis (LSA) in uncovering the underlying factors affecting the quality of service provided by the airline companies. The purpose of this study is to explore the generic service quality characteristics pertaining to the airline industry by mining the comments provided by the passengers of various airline companies across the globe. Passengers are under no pressure to express their concerns, opinions, or suggestions for improvement of service quality. Therefore, we posit that the customers' comments are reflections of their perception of quality of service that they have already experienced. This study will help the stakeholders better understand the characteristics of service quality in the airline industry. The findings will provide managers in the airline industry with insights for managing and improving the quality of service rendered to their customers. We collected 1,069 customer comments on eleven airline companies and conducted an LSA on them to identify five factors affecting the service quality in the industry. The findings suggest that caring and friendly crews, luggage handling, in-flight meals, in-flight entertainment, and service expectation are the five critical factors of the airline service quality in the eyes of the customers.