The Impact of Foreign Flight Attendants’ Service Quality on Behavioral Intention Toward Their Home Country—Applied SERVPERF Model

Myoungjin Yu,Sunghyup Sean Hyun

doi:10.3390/su11154136

Abstract

This study applied a service performance (SERVPERF) model to measure service quality and used a quantitative method for testing four research hypotheses. This research aims to examine the impacts of foreign flight attendants’ service quality on behavioral intention toward their home country. As a result, the service touch of foreign flight attendants was influenced by curiosity, image, and behavioral intention toward their home country. Thus, this is an important finding that flight attendants conduct a crucial role not only for the airline but also for tourism in their home country. And empathy was found to be the most important dimension of service quality when a flight attendant offered a service to foreigners. This dimension was related to individual attention and communication skills. However, the limitation of this study is that the respondents were passengers of only one nationality; further research should, therefore, include a more diverse range of nationalities.

Highlights

The international airline industry has acted as a great contributor about economic growth
This study aims to measure the impact of a foreign flight attendant’s service quality (SQ) of personal touch on curiosity, image, and behavioral intention (BI) regarding their home country
This indicates that the SQ of the foreign flight attendant impacted personal touch followed by curiosity, image, and BI toward their home country

Summary

Introduction

The international airline industry has acted as a great contributor about economic growth. It helped more convenient displacement of passengers and enlargement the leisure and tourism choices as well as international trade activities [1]. A lot of airlines tried to provide a better service quality to passengers because they recognized the importance of passengers to keep their businesses [3]. To provide better quality of experiences and services, airlines need to read passengers’ mind [3]. Flight attendants are the point of contact and front-line service employees who shape the experience of airline passengers through providing the quality of service during the flight service process [5]

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion