The Impact of Delays on Customers’ Satisfaction: an Empirical Analysis of the British Airways On-Time Performance at Heathrow Airport

Andreas Papatheodorou,Daniel Randall,Eric Tchouamou Njoya,Marina Efthymiou,Pak Lam Lo

doi:10.5028/jatm.v11.977

Abstract

Increased congestion at hub airports affects on-time airline performance to the detriment of customer satisfaction and may have substantially negative repercussions for airlines in a hypercompetitive environment. This paper concentrates on the on-time performance of British Airways (BA) at London Heathrow Airport (LHR) to identify BA’s delays/disruption management; measure the passengers’ expectations in case of a delay; and investigate the passenger satisfaction levels. A survey of 160 BA passengers based on a close-ended questionnaire was conducted, complemented by semi-structured interviews with four members of staff at BA’s network operations department. The survey results show that BA has been able to satisfy its customers by matching or exceeding their expectations and that those customers will travel with BA again.Interestingly, the results contradict the widespread belief that BA passengers are annoyed by a service failure/delay at LHR; this is because they expect to experience such a delay anyway.

Highlights

Hub and spoke is the dominant method of transporting goods and passengers used by most Full Service Network Carriers (FSNCs) due to the efficiency of the model (Doganis 2005; Doganis 2009; O’Connell and Williams 2011)
Around 40 participants travelled 5-9 times and 75 out of the 160 travelled 1-4 times with British Airways (BA) in the previous year. 36% of the participants travelled for business purposes, 49% for tourism and the remaining 15%, i.e. 23 out of 158 participants, falls in the category Visiting Friends and Relatives (VFR)
The participants were asked to evaluate the overall experience based on several factors. 158 valid responses were collected in this question

Summary

Introduction

Hub and spoke is the dominant method of transporting goods and passengers used by most Full Service Network Carriers (FSNCs) due to the efficiency of the model (Doganis 2005; Doganis 2009; O’Connell and Williams 2011) Concentrating their operations at few large hubs and exploitation of transfer traffic through coordinated banks of arrivals and departures enable airlines to reduce their costs, taking advantage of economies of density and offer higher frequency (O’Connell 2006; Fageda and FloresFillol 2016). Another method of transport for airlines, primarily used by Low Cost Carriers and offering a credible substitute to those passengers willing to avoid hub airports, is the point-to-point concept (Papatheodorou 2002; Efthymiou et al 2016; Redpath et al 2017). British Airways’ main hub of operation, namely London Heathrow Airport (LHR), is the UK’s largest hub, handling

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