Application of affective engineering to service industries: feelings from airlines’ in-flight service elements

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Despite the importance of understanding customers’ feelings in the service industry, previous studies of Affective Engineering have focused mostly on physical products. On the other hand, this study aims to apply Affective Engineering to a service industry, specifically, airlines’ international in-flight services in order to analyse the relationship between service elements of airlines and customers’ feelings. To this end, this study followed the Schütte [Schütte, S. (2005). Engineering emotional values in product design: Kansei engineering in development (Doctoral dissertation). Linkoping: Institute of Technology, Linkoping University] model of Affective Engineering together with the methodology of Chen et al. [Chen et al., M. C., Chang, K. C., Hsu, C. L., & Xiao, J. H. (2015). Applying a Kansei engineering-based logistics service design approach to developing international express services. International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management, 45(6), 618–646] for spanning the space of properties and of Ayas et al. [Ayas, E., Eklund, J., & Ishihara, S. (2008). Affective design of waiting areas in primary healthcare. The TQM Journal, 20(4), 389–408] for data analysis. This paper found out that the most desired feelings for international in-flight services differ according to gender, and different service elements play important roles in the arousal of certain feelings among men and women. By extracting decision rules, this paper identified several service compositions that arouse strong safe feelings and friendly feelings for men and women, respectively. These detailed results provide managerial implications for the service design of airlines.