Abstract
Over the past several decades, the aviation industry has been reshaped, centering on global alliances, and these have grown exponentially. However, it is still not clear whether they are achieving sustained competitive advantages, and what are the specific competitive advantages of the three alliances (oneworld, SkyTeam, Star Alliance) arising on the customer side. This study aims to examine whether global alliance groups outperform the non-alliance group, how the three alliances differ regarding passengers’ perceptions, and what their competitive advantages are. A hybrid text mining analysis was adopted as this study’s method. Frequency tests, t-tests, one-way analysis of variance tests, and three-step mediated regression analyses were performed using 6393 ordinal and word-of-mouth (WOM) data. We found that the degree of passengers’ perceptions of alliances was low, the non-alliance group outperformed the alliance groups, and there were no significant differences between alliances on service rating and sentiment score. Only oneworld has competitive advantages that link to passengers’ service rating and sentiment score. These findings imply that alliances could not ensure competitive advantages that derive from customers’ perceptions, and although passengers partly perceived several selling points, their differentiation strategies are not successful.
Highlights
The aviation industry is a representative core industry of the world and has tremendous economic, political, and technological significance [1]
Recognizing the above uncertainties, this study aims to examine whether airlines participating in global alliances outperform non-alliance airlines, how the three major alliances differ on passengers’ perceptions as measured by service ratings and sentiment scores, and what the sustained competitive advantages of current alliances are
We found that five main research gaps still exist: 1. the problem of measuring collective competitive advantages of global airline alliances, 2. the value of perceptions on the passenger side related to research topics, 3. the problem of measuring timing, 4. the possibility of new methodologies, and 5. the recognition of the existence of the three major alliances in the aviation industry
Summary
The aviation industry is a representative core industry of the world and has tremendous economic, political, and technological significance [1]. Considering recent cases related to COVID-19 and the global spread of the virus, bankruptcies and financial problems surrounding even major airlines have frequently occurred. Virgin Australia, Australia’s second-largest domestic air carrier, is currently near collapse. These facts show that the aviation industry is extremely vulnerable to environmental changes [3], which can bring about a decrease in profitability. Despite the deregulation of the U.S aviation market in the 1970s and the privatization of the European market in the 1980s [4], as well as the end of the “Two airlines” regulation in Australia, in 1990, and the fact that the globalization of the world aviation industry [5] has progressed, each country still maintains strict regulatory restrictions, and strong market barriers exist [3]
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