COVID-19: transforming air passengers’ behaviour and reshaping their expectations towards the airline industry

Abstract

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 crisis has hindered travelling and transformed air passengers’ expectations, which profoundly impacted airlines, affecting tourism-related activities. Therefore, it is essential to determine the air passenger's perception regarding the airline services that create positive and negative opinions. Accordingly, this research note (RN) assesses air passenger's engagement with the airline service providers (ASP) on Twitter. This RN turns to social capital theory as a theoretical base to evaluate how the passengers engage with the ASP to depict their expectations on Twitter. The authors conducted two analyses. First, python was applied for tweet mining and sentiment analysis (SA) to identify the polarity in passenger's engagement with five ASP. This analysis depicted the positive sentiments of the passengers towards the ASP. Second, a qualitative analysis was carried to identify the themes that shape passenger's expectations before and after the outbreak of COVID-19 as they engage with the ASP on Twitter. This RN appears to be a pioneer in presenting a thematic model for the airline industry that compares air passenger's expectations on Twitter before and after the outbreak of COVID-19.