Explore Rice

5/15/2005

Friendly skies mean a lot to airline passengers

When it comes to flying, helpful, friendly airline employees go a long way toward ensuring happy customers. A new study by Rice researchers shows, however, that check-in personnel aren't particularly important to passengers' overall satisfaction unless a problem occurs. In that case, they're the airlines' first line of defense.  

----------------------

When a flight is delayed or over-booked, baggage is mishandled, or passengers are denied boarding, it's not necessarily the flight attendants, but the gate personnel who are in a position to assuage customers' dissatisfaction with the airline, as research at Rice indicates.

For the first time, airline operational failures, namely, late arrivals, mishandled baggage and denied boardings, have been directly linked to consumers' rate of complaints and overall evaluation of an airline. Most important, the new study by Rice University researchers pinpoints how these individual problems affect consumers' satisfaction with some service elements of the airlines and not others.

"Airline passengers care most about how airline employees treat them, but this study showed that airline check-in personnel actually aren't particularly important to passengers' overall satisfaction, unless there's a problem," says Sally Widener, one of the Rice researchers. "It's when there's a delay in the flight's arrival that airline personnel at the gate are more significant to customers' overall satisfaction than even the flight attendants."

An assistant professor of management at Rice University's Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management, Widener, along with Jones School colleague Shannon Anderson and Rice doctoral student Ginger Davis, co-authored the paper, titled "Operational Performance as a Driver of Customer Satisfaction and Dissatisfaction in the U.S. Airline Industry."  

While operational failures, namely late arrivals, had one of the most significant effects on airline customers' satisfaction, mishandled baggage represented the largest portion of overall customer complaints. However, passengers' satisfaction with the airlines' onboard employees most influenced both overall satisfaction and customer complaints.

"Essentially, this relationship told us that the happier passengers are, the more satisfied they are and the less likely they will complain, which indicates the overall importance of the human interaction," Widener says.

Less intuitive were the researchers' findings that involve customers' satisfaction with the quality of food served on the plane and with denied boardings. Data showed a positive correlation between increased satisfaction with airlines' food and diminished overall satisfaction.   Similarly, the rate of an airline's denied boardings corresponded positively to increases in customers' overall satisfaction and to their satisfaction with a number of the airline's service components.

"This could certainly indicate that food may be used by the airlines as a short-term response to service failures," Widener explains.

"Similarly, passengers who are denied boarding on a particular flight may ultimately be satisfied with the airlines as a result of their having been compensated," Widener says.

The Rice researchers also analyzed the way differences in operational performances and customer satisfaction between airlines that use short-haul routes with few flight amenities versus those that offer longer flights on larger planes, typically with more amenities.

Because consumers self-select airlines based on their expectations, they found that passengers' expectations greatly influence their evaluation of the airline's performance and service. All else being equal, customers who prefer seating comfort to great food, for example, will select an airline that promotes very comfortable seats. Regardless of the quality of the food, their evaluation will depend primarily by the seating comfort.

"This suggests that airlines need to manage expectations of their customers and then deliver against those expectations, or they could end up with very poor customer satisfaction," says Widener.

To measure consumer satisfaction, the researchers used data collected from over 500,000 customer surveys by a major marketing firm from 1998 to 2002 for nine major airlines.   Passengers rated their satisfaction with the overall flight experience and with components of the flight experience, including their interaction with gate personnel, flight attendants' service on-board the airplane, the overall cleanliness and appearance of the cabin, seating comfort and legroom, the amount and quality of food, and passenger satisfaction with the airline's arrival and departure times and with its baggage handling.

Widener and her colleagues employed direct measures of extreme dissatisfaction in the form of rates of passenger complaints, the rate of denied boardings, incidents of mishandled luggage and late arrivals, and a measure of capacity utilization or load – all of which are collected and publicized monthly by the U.S. Bureau of Transportation.

Experienced in both public and private accounting, Widener joined the Jones School in 2001. Her research on performance measurement and control within organizations is widely published in such scholarly publications as the Journal of Accounting and Economics, Accounting, Organizations and Society and the Journal of Management Accounting Research.

Widener earned her master's degree in accounting from Colorado State University and her Ph.D. in business administration from the University of Colorado at Boulder.  

For more information about this research, contact Widener at widener@rice.edu or Debra Thomas in the Jones School at dthomas@rice.edu .

Research @Rice 2005