Airline Service Research Articles

Thainess in airlines services strategy: a case from Thailand

The Thainess is embedded in Thais. And, it is more clearly can be seen when a person was cultivated in the school system. In this academic paper highlights the symbiosis of Thainess in hospitality industry, as such hotel comparatively to the air transport as strategy. The authors have studied researches, books, and airlines’ website strategies. Thainess is a unique customer experience offering, specifically the full-service airline “Thai Airways” as national flag carriers propose the service ‘Thai Touch’ through human six senses namely; seeing, smelling, savoring of teste, sounding, touching, and heartfelt feeling. While, Bangkok Airways represents the uniqueness of Thai culture symbiosis with products and services, such as airport terminal, aircraft decoration, and snack serving in all its lounges. On the other hand, low-cost carriers are commonly practicing the Thai culture in welcoming passengers as “wai”. Additionally, the low-cost carriers are presenting and blending their organizational culture in service, for instance fun, energetic, and friendly. Besides, low-cost airlines stress on price competition rather than Thainess. As an illustration, ThaiVietair excels on keen and dedicated workforces, prompt, reliable, and competitive price. As well as, Thai Lion Air presents the kebaya uniform which was originally from Indonesia.

Sentiment Analysis of Customer Feedback and Reviews for Airline Services using Language Representation Model

The competitive airline sector has grown at a breakneck pace in the last two decades. A useful source for collecting consumer feedback and performing various forms of analysis on it is proper data collection. This collection of data can be used for sentiment analysis. Sentiment analysis is a type of analysis that involves extracting sentiment to find attitudes and emotions associated with the text or data supplied. It's a classification approach in which machine learning techniques are used to identify positive and negative words or reviews in text-driven databases. Further to explain the reasons for negative comments, a word cloud and a bar graph are used. Sentiment analysis is used to analyze the Airline reviews dataset in this paper. To test the performance of sentiment analysis, many Machine Learning (ML) algorithms have been utilized, such as Naive Bayes, Support Vector Machine, and Decision Tree (DT), and each of these approaches has produced distinct results. The performance of Google's BERT algorithm has been evaluated to that of other machine learning algorithms in our research. Furthermore, this paper explores the Bert architecture, which has been pre-trained on two NLP tasks: Masked language modeling and Sentence prediction. The ”Random Forest” is used as a baseline against which the results of the ”BERT Model” are compared because its performance is the best among the machine learning models. In terms of performance criteria such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score, it is discovered that BERT outperformed the other ML techniques.

항공서비스전공 대학생의 학업적 자기효능감이 전공만족도에 미치는 영향 : 그릿의 매개효과

There is a need to enhance satisfaction with their major to ensure the academic success of the college students of the Airline Service Department, as they face the biggest challenge and a realistic obstacle, job-seeking. The purpose of this study is to examine the structural relationship between academic self-efficacy and grit as the factors that influence satisfaction with major among the college students of the Airline Service Department. For this, the researcher surveyed the students who majored in Airline Service, and a total of 173 questionnaires were used in the analysis for this study. The findings of this study were as follows; First, the academic self-efficacy of the college students of the Airline Service Department had a significant and positive impact on grit. Second, the grit of the college students of the Airline Service Department had a significant and positive impact on their satisfaction with their major. Third, the academic self-efficacy of the college students of the Airline Service Department had a significant and positive impact on their satisfaction with their major. Fourth, grit had a significant mediating effect on the relationship between the academic self-efficacy of the college students of the Airline Service Department and their satisfaction with their major. The implication of this study is that the class environment of the college students of the Airline Service Department can be enhanced while teaching methods can be reviewed to provide classes that are in line with the levels of these students to enhance their satisfaction with their major.

Analyzing service quality of domestic airlines in an emerging country- Bangladesh by structural equation models

Nowadays, air travel has become an important transportation in life. Travel by airline helps to save time and shorter the distance to travel from one place to another. Offering a better service to airline customers is extremely crucial in the existing competing environment for the development of airlines. Service providers necessitate comprehending customers' expectations from the services with the aim of better dealing with their wants and expectations. The objectives of this research are to evaluate the domestic airline SQ in Bangladesh and to identify the important variables that influence the SQ of domestic airlines. Data collection was conducted with a purpose-built questionnaire survey for the evaluation of SQ assessed by the service users. For this study, 600 persons, who used domestic airlines service in Bangladesh at least once in their life, were interviewed. Several models were developed with twenty-three endogenous variables and two latent variables namely ‘system performance’ and ‘service features’. Finally, the proposed models have been compared and the optimal one is found out, which best represents the actual scenario has been identified as the best model. Result shows that ‘pilot skill’, ‘technical safety’, ‘comfort level’, ‘aircraft fitness’ and ‘physical condition’ are the most significant observed variables that influence the airline service. It is also found that the users are least satisfied with ‘toilet condition at airport’, ‘cleanness of airport’ and ‘luggage handling’. The airline companies and concerned authority may focus the results to take necessary actions for improving the service. From the findings of the results, the recommendations can be listed as the actions required by the authority and the airline operations in Bangladesh.

Stock Market Performance of the US Hospitality And Tourism During the Covid-19 Pandemic

In this study, the stock market performance of the travel and leisure industry during the COVID-19 pandemic is investigated by use of the three-regime Markov switching model. The analysis employs daily data for six subsectors (airlines, gambling, hotels, leisure services, restaurants and bars, as well as travel and tourism) for the US from January 2018 to November 2021. Estimation results provide strong evidence of regime switching behavior with wide differences across subsectors during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. A longer duration of high volatility characterizes the airline and leisure services indices. These sectors exhibit the most pronounced downturn that was not fully recovered in November 2021. In contrast, the period of high volatility in the restaurant, gaming, and hotel industries is relatively short, and stock market performance recovers almost to the general trend. Of all subsectors, restaurants and bars experience the shortest duration of high volatility, limited to the second quarter of 2020. The stock market indices for the travel and tourism industry (mainly car rentals) are also highly volatile, but this pattern was observed already before the pandemic.

ANALYSIS OF FACTORS INFLUENCING THE PRICING OF AIR TICKETS

The article is devoted to discussing topical issues about the formation of the price of plane tickets. The paper analyzes and evaluates the degree of influence of factors on the pricing process using regression analysis methods. At the first stage, a review of the available research sources of foreign and Russian authors was carried out, according to the results of which the main characteristics determining the price level of air tickets were identified and considered. In the course of studying the issue, the experience and conclusions, based on previously performed studies of foreign segments of air transportation, are extended to the selection and analysis of current data on the Russian market. The assessment of the degree of a possible influence of the considered price-forming indicators on air ticket fares was carried out using four econometric models of the dependence of ticket prices on exchange rates, fare/air route characteristics, socio-economic and secondary factors. They are checked for lowcost and economy segments based on information on 15 thousand of air tickets of Russian air carriers for the period from 19.01.2021 to 12.02.2021, presented in the form of a single data set. The data was collected independently by daily monitoring of information from the official websites of airlines, federal websites of Rosstat, and Rosaviation. As a result of the research conducted within the framework of this article, it was revealed that with an increase in the distance of the flight, the cost of the ticket increases proportionally. The average income of the population negatively affects prices in the economy and budget classes. A similar trend can be traced concerning the cost of jet fuel at the airport of departure and nonstop flights. Reducing the number of days between the dates of ticket purchase and flight departure will also affect the increase in ticket prices. With a decrease in the exchange rate of foreign currency, the cost of economy class air tickets changes significantly compared to the budget. The reverse trend is observed in the case of the IATA exchange rate, where the effect falls on the last group of shipments. The listed characteristics are identified as the most significant relative to the considered classes of tariff groups in the Russian aviation industry. The results of the work can be recommended to air carriers for use in the process of forming the cost of tickets to achieve maximum efficiency and profitability of the business, used by consumers of the airline services as a tool for finding and buying air tickets with the best conditions and offers.

How do pandemics affect intercity air travel? Implications for traffic and environment

This paper investigates how a pandemic affects the distribution of traffic between public and private transport and the emissions from the transport sector. By assuming that there exists higher health risk of traveling in public transport than in private transport and using air transport and private cars as examples, we find the following results. First, the effects of a pandemic on the traffic volumes of airline services and private cars depend crucially on, for instance, the willingness-to-pay of travelers, the degree of substitution between transport modes, the demand-side network effect (via schedule delays), and the supply-side network effect (via the economies of traffic density). In particular, heterogeneous effects of the pandemic on the traffic volumes and flight frequencies of different airline services are found. Second, the total transport-related CO2 emissions decrease after the pandemic if the CO2 emissions per air traveler (or per flight) are sufficiently high, or the degree of substitution between airline services and private cars is sufficiently low. Third, numerical examples on the change in price of car travel and the introduction of high-speed rail show consistent insights. Finally, several policy implications are discussed.

Assessing Air Services and Facilities Provided to Passengers with Disabilities at EgyptAir.

The number of passengers with disabilities (PWDs) has increased internationally, and airline service and facilities suppliers may have the ability to generate a profitable opportunity in the niche markets. However, it is less obvious what the service requirements of these disabled air passengers are, in addition to providing airline servicesand facilities. This research aims to identify the current reality of services provided to passengers with disabilities at EgyptAir and assesses the satisfaction levels of disabled air passengers. To achieve that, this research used the descriptive analytical approach, where a questionnaire was prepared and distributed to a random sample of four hundred and eight (408) passengers with disabilities in EgyptAir. The results of the tools were analysed using descriptive statistics, factor analysis, reliability analysis, coefficient analysis, Pearson correlation analysis, regression analysis, and chi-square test with the support of SPSS22.0. The research results show a very strong positive correlation between services and facilities provided to passengers with disabilities and passengers with disabilities’ satisfaction levels with services and facilities in EgyptAir Airlines, Cairo international airport, and aircraft on board. The research recommended that screens at airline check-in counters should show which counter is designated for PWDs, as some of them wait in line for hours without understanding they have priority registration.

Unscrambling Customer Recommendations: A Novel LSTM Ensemble Approach in Airline Recommendation Prediction Using Online Reviews

Customer feedback is an essential criterion for upcoming customers to learn from their experience with a company’s products. Customer reviews and ratings also help companies improve performance and figure out new methodologies to provide better services. This research concentrates on customer reviews and ratings to investigate which product a customer evaluates and its association with its recommendations. This work predicts the user recommendations in two modules. The first module performs sentiment analysis of customer reviews using the long short-term memory (LSTM) model, which estimates the probability of the customer’s sentiment about the airline’s services. The second module experimented over only various service aspect ratings on different airline services provided by customers. These two modules ensemble together to determine the predictive recommendations of the airlines. The obtained results reinforce the essential theoretical contribution to the literature on service appraisal, online review, and recommendations. In addition, our proposed ensemble approach will be helpful to those practitioners who wish to use any proposal that will provide a quick and essential vision by bringing together customer-generated reviews and ratings, thereby helping them in strategy designing, service improvement, and post-purchases planning. Also, forthcoming travelers may benefit from this proposed approach by assimilating an aggregating view of service quality.

Accessibility of high-speed rail (HSR) stations and HSR–air competition: Evidence from China

Most high-speed rail (HSR) stations in China were built in the urban periphery. This study investigates whether peripheral HSR stations increase the demand for air transportation, a mode of transportation that competes with HSR. We establish a series of novel city-pair level indicators of accessibility of HSR stations using geographical information system (GIS) technology, and adopt an extended difference-in-differences analysis to comprehensively elucidate the effect of HSR station accessibility on parallel air transportation. Based on the data of 581 Chinese air routes from 2003 to 2019, we find that less accessible HSR stations increase passenger traffic and flights on parallel air routes, but do not affect cargo traffic on parallel air routes. Specifically, travel time to/from HSR stations, rather than the physical location of HSR stations, affects the intermodal substitution between HSR and air. Our study indicates that for 1 % decline in the public transport travel time-based station accessibility for a given HSR route, the annual number of passengers on the parallel air route will increase by 809. This effect, which would increase the demand for airline services in the long run, is larger for routes shorter than 1,500 km, routes with airports that serve as bases for low-cost air carriers, and routes connecting hub cities, tourism cities, or cities with advanced economic conditions. Our findings offer new insights into HSR station accessibility and provide policy implications regarding the integration of intra-city public transportation systems with HSR stations.

Service Quality and Passenger Satisfaction of Airlines with Special Reference to Students of Christ College (Autonomous) Irinjalakuda

Service sector has become more relatively important as it has become a most essential part of any economy. One of the industries in this service sector is the Airlines industry. Being one of the modes of transport that propels the economic activity of a Nation, it has become essential to study the quality of service that should be made available to the users by this industry. So far the focus on airline service research has been to identify airline selection criteria and performance rankings. Of late the focus of research efforts has shifted to examine the issues inherent in various passenger segments. Prime objective of this study is to analyse the relationship between air passengers’ class of service and their perception of service quality and also purpose of the trip, and satisfaction. This investigation indicates that majority of respondents perceived that responsiveness is most important, followed by tangibility, empathy, assurance and reliability. In contrary, consumer satisfaction level is more for tangibility followed by responsiveness, reliability, empathy and assurance.

VR콘텐츠를 활용한 항공객실서비스 교수-학습 모형 설계

Objectives This study was conducted for the purpose of designing an airline service curriculum by applying VR (Virtual Reality) content to school education. It is for strengthen the vocational capacity required to perform the work of flight attendants for airline service departments’ students. Methods Learner demand analysis was conducted to design the airline service department curriculum using VR content. In addition, for the design of airline service teaching-learning content, areas feasible in school education were selected based on the contents of airline service education presented by the National Competency Standard Learning Module developed by experts. After that, the educational content was selected based on the ability unit to use VR content. Results Based on the analysis of the needs of learners and instructors, the most effective education method in this study is education using VR content, which is consistent with previous studies that respond more quickly to problem situations and reduce problem solving time in the current vocational education environment. Based on this, the most effective airline service teaching-learning model using VR content was presented. Conclusions The aviation industry is a field in which various areas are combined. In the future, it is necessary to develop VR content so that it can be used as practical educational content not only in schools but also in the aviation industry. Therefore, it is expected that it will be able to establish itself as a good educational content that strengthens practical competencies in the educational field.

Factors Affecting the International Flight Delays and Their Impact on Airline Operation and Management and Passenger Compensations Fees in Air Transport Industry: Case Study of a Selected Airlines in Europe

This paper aims to analyze the causes of flight delays of a selected airline operating in Europe and identify potential risks and reasons for delays in air transport, which carry risk, especially in connection with passenger dissatisfaction and the resulting need to pay compensation for delayed flights, according to EU law, which brings significant financial costs for airlines. Data collected from the years 2013–2019 have been used for the purposes of this article, including data on the duration and causes of the delays and the characteristics of individual flights, such as the flight type, aircraft type, time of departure, aircraft capacity, and the load factor. Multidimensional statistics methods have been applied for data processing, namely tests of independence and correspondence analysis. Dependencies have been presented in graphical form using correspondence maps. The analysis shows that the total share of delayed flights of the company in question does not increase over the mentioned period of time. The analysis furthermore proved that higher capacity aircraft were rather prone to longer delays. The share of delayed charter flights declined slightly over the period under review, while the number of delays caused by airline operating reasons, aircraft clearance by supplier companies, technical maintenance and aircraft defects, operating procedures, and crew flight standards and airport restrictions is increasing. The analysis also shows that the delays propagated by the delays of the previous flights are becoming more frequent, with the exception of the year 2019. In the last pre-COVID year, air traffic control could boast about a positive trend regarding the number of produced delays over the years, contributing to greater air passenger satisfaction and airline service quality. Due to the gradual revival of air transport after the COVID pandemic lockdowns, the topic of flight delays, passenger customer satisfaction and financial costs for the resulting delays is once again an actual issue for air management and operation.

The Effect of Airline Service Major Students’ Online Practical Classrelated Stress on College Maladjustment and Dropout Intention during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Moderated Mediation Model of Resilience

Introduction. Airline service major students have experienced very high online practical class-related stress during the COVID-19 pandemic, because students in online classes have not had the ability to practice service skills and customer service techniques that would previously have been learned in face-to-face classes (e.g., service role-playing, food and beverage role-playing, etc.). Thus, online practical class-related stress has led to high college life maladjustment and dropout intention among students. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to identify the relationships among online practical class-related stress, college life maladjustment, and dropout intention, and to examine the effect of resilience as a moderated mediation that weakens the negative impact between college life maladjustment and dropout intention. Samples and methods. The participants in this study were 314 airline service major students from three universities in South Korea. Data were collected from sophomore (40.1%), junior (30.9%), and senior (29%) students in South Korea. This study used SPSS Win.21.0 statistics programs to conduct the frequency test, exploratory analysis, and reliability and correlation tests. For the moderated mediation analysis, ‘Model 14 of PROCESS macro ver.4.0’ was used as the statistical method. Results. First, dropout intention had positive correlations with both online practical class-related stress (r = .518, p<.01) and college life maladjustment (r = .325, p<.01), while it had a negative correlation with resilience (r = -.494, p < .01). Second, resilience was found to have conditional indirect effects on the relationship between online practical class-related stress and dropout intention through college life maladjustment that were significant (p < .01) when the resilience values were 4.0 (.0379~.1200) and 4.5 (.0244~.0740), respectively. Therefore, the moderated mediation effect of resilience was verified. Practical significance. This study found that airline service major students with high resilience have decreased dropout intention. The results of this study indicate that students’ resilience should be fostered and reinforced with the goal of reducing or overcoming students’ college life maladjustment and dropout intention during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Design of civil aviation tableware based on user experience

In-flight meals are an important touchpoint between passengers and airline services, tableware design is the carrier of air service and brand culture. This paper analyzes the in-flight meal experience of passengers in a special high-altitude environment, It is proposed that there is a "pressure space" in the in-flight meal experience, and takes tableware design as the entry point, from the tableware shape, color, material, and other elements, the plan of the cabin tableware design is proposed. Make aviation tableware artistic, aesthetic and economical, relieve the fatigue of passengers due to high-altitude flights, and improve the service level of airlines.

COMPARISON OF CLASSIFICATION ALGORITHM IN CLASSIFYING AIRLINE PASSENGER SATISFACTION

In order to revive the airline industry, which is being hit by the current recession, it is essential to restore passenger confidence in airlines by improving the services provided by airlines. With the influence of technology in all industrial fields, airlines can now use Machine Learning to find the essential points that can make passengers feel satisfied with airline services and classify passenger satisfaction. This study presents the making of Machine Learning models starting from Data Acquisition, Data Cleaning, Exploratory Data Analysis, Preprocessing, and Model Building. It is concluded that Random Forest is the best algorithm used in this case study, with an F1 accuracy score of 89.4, ROC-AUC score of 0.90, and a shorter modeling period than other algorithms used in this study.

Assessment of hub airports' connectivity and Self-Connection Potentials

This study utilizes the global flight schedules over a period of one week to identify and evaluate all possible connections, including online, interline and passenger self-connections and assess their feasibility and practicality in terms of total travel time between two cities, transit time, flying distances, connection types, airport accessibility, airline services, and origin/destination markets. Using the feasible connections, this research then ranked and assessed Top 50 airports by connectivity potential and self-connection potential. It showed the conditions under which an airline should make strategic partnerships with other airlines and/or with the connecting airports to offer more transfer opportunities that have not been possible by the traditional interline agreements. The framework developed in this research can help airlines and airports identify and optimize their connectivity potentials and develop strategic partnerships.

How airline managers assess their competitive positions: A case study in Turkey

This study focused on how airline managers perceive their competitive positions. Based on the perceptions of the airline managers, strengths-weaknesses-opportunities-threats (SWOT) analyses were carried out. All scheduled and unscheduled passenger carriers in Turkey were used as sample for this research. The data were acquired through qualitative research by semi-structured interviews with senior executives of the airlines. This research demonstrated how airline managers assess their competitive positions in the market. The similarities and differences related to each airlines’ strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats were put forward. Interviews among managers of the airline companies operating in Turkey revealed varied perceptions on business models and airline service factors. A criteria framework for the airlines to apply a SWOT analysis was proposed.

Evaluating the efficiency of global airlines: A new weighted SBM-NDEA approach with non-uniform abatement factor

Over the past decade, issues related to environmental controls in the airline industry have arisen, attracting increased attention from policy and decision makers. Several global initiatives, including the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA) and the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU-ETS), have been proposed to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. As passenger numbers grow, airlines could become one of the largest contributors to global warming. In practice, airline operations involve a series of network processes, and these processes can be grouped into two subprocesses: a) production and b) airline services. Based on our literature review, only a few studies have examined the efficiency of airlines using network data envelopment analysis (NDEA) instead of the conventional data envelopment analysis (DEA) framework (also known as the black-box approach). In addition, the traditional treatment of undesirable outputs (e.g., CO2 emissions) in the DEA approach involves the use of a single abatement factor to reduce both undesirable and beneficial outputs. Performance assessment using this weakly disposable Shephard technique may overestimate the technical efficiency of the evaluated units. The main objective of this study is to investigate the performance of the two subprocesses of global airlines by incorporating CO2 emissions using multiple abatement factors based on the Kuosmanen technology. To capture different airline groupings, we use a network DEA model to estimate the technical efficiency of global airlines in alliance and non-alliance groups. A sample of 29 global airlines in 2018 is used in the study. The results reveal that the main source of overall technical inefficiency of most airlines is scale inefficiency in both production and airline services.

Low-cost Transport Selection Model on the Polish Airline Services Market

Low-cost Transport Selection Model on the Polish Airline Services Market