Impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on airline passengers’ recovery satisfaction: An experimental study

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted nearly every country in the world and affected numerous industries. Many businesses stopped or restricted their operations, resulting in service failures. This study aims to investigate the effect of customer participation and service failure on customer recovery satisfaction in the airline industry. The research employed a scenario-based experiment with 180 respondents as the samples. Convenience sampling was adopted. The responses of customer recovery satisfaction were measured on a 7-point Likert scale. Exploratory factor analysis was then used to validate the measurement and a general linear model was carried out to examine the impacts of customer participation and service failure on customer recovery satisfaction. The results showed that when the failure was due to the COVID-19, the highest customer satisfaction occurred when customers jointly participated in service recovery. This study also revealed that increasing customer participation during the service failure due to pilots on strike resulted in decreased customer recovery satisfaction. The current study contributes to the existing literature related to customer participation in service recovery. This research also provides a practical contribution for service managers when designing the level of customer participation in service recovery.