An investigation of service quality, customer satisfaction and loyalty in China’s airline market

By Hongwei Jiang, Yahua Zhang. 2016

289 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Customer loyalty is a source of competitive advantage and an important intangible asset to any organisations, but empirical evidence from China's airline market regarding the determinants of passenger satisfaction and loyalty is lacking. This paper investigates the service quality of four major airlines in China's domestic market and explores the links between their service quality and customer satisfaction, as well as the conditions under which airlines can retain existing passengers. In line with previous studies, service quality variables are significant factors influencing customer satisfaction levels. However, satisfactory service was not found to result in higher customer loyalty among business travellers. In comparison to Hainan Airlines, passengers who travelled with Air China, China Southern and China Eastern were more likely to switch to an alternate carrier, indicating lower levels of brand loyalty. In addition, the frequent flyer programs (FFPs) have been largely a failure for the four major airlines in terms of increasing customer loyalty, as revealed in this study. It is necessary to draw distinctions between business and leisure travellers when studying the determinants of customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. Ticket pricing had a positive and significant effect on passengers' overall satisfaction and in turn strengthened customer loyalty among leisure travellers, but achieved no impact on the satisfaction and loyalty of business passengers. Some demographic variables such as gender, income and education are statistically significant for one group of passengers but not for another in the probit models estimated. It is suggested that different marketing strategies may be used to target different market segments to improve customer loyalty.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Marketing, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/75ca0c0d15138fead036db07acdc72625f61c234

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In Economics and Econometrics

1. Salman Zulfiqar
2. Saira Aziz
3. Waseem Bahadur

In Marketing

1. Salman Zulfiqar
2. Saira Aziz
3. Waseem Bahadur

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

1. Salman Zulfiqar
2. Saira Aziz
3. Waseem Bahadur

Citations in the corpus

• Effect of employee empathy on customer satisfaction and loyalty during employee–customer interactions: The mediating role of customer affective commitment and perceived service quality (2018, methodology): “Recent literature provided the support where loyalty dimensions, i.e. attitudinal and behavioral loyalty were used to measure CL toward the service brand (Jiang & Zhang, 2016; Kim, Wong, Chang, & Park, 2016; Nyadzayo & Khajehzadeh, 2016).”