Air-Travelers’ Perceptions of Service Quality during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence from Tripadvisor Sites

Has passenger satisfaction at airports changed with the onset of COVID-19? The case of Seville Airport (Spain)

The changes that have come about at airports in recent decades in the areas of security, deregulation, and technological advances have affected both airport management and the passenger experience at airport facilities. In addition, all around the world, the airport sector has been struck by the COVID-19 pandemic during 2020 and 2021. Using a broad sample of data taken from Airport Service Quality (ASQ) surveys and robust econometric methodology, specifically, an Ordered Logit model with Principal Component Analysis, this paper seeks to cover the gap in the academic literature regarding the effect of a worldwide pandemic on passenger satisfaction at airports during the 2015-2021 period, while taking into consideration the passenger profile and journey and airport attributes. It takes as its reference a Spanish regional airport, which had been experiencing a strong expansion process prior to the pandemic. With respect to the variables linked to the passenger profile, a differential behavior is observed in satisfaction depending on nationality, motive for travel, and destination. In addition, the four facility- and airport process-related dimensions are significant, with cleanliness and comfort standing out above all others. These are even more important in a health emergency scenario such as is currently being experienced. Lastly, 2021 is shown to cause a downturn in the positive passenger satisfaction with the airport that had been observed during the first year of the pandemic. Therefore, more long-term management is required alongside the initial rapid and efficient action taken by airports, with up-to-date information for passengers to internalize the inconveniences associated with this long-drawn-out period of uncertainty.

Is negative e-WOM more powerful? Multimodal data analysis on air passengers’ perception of COVID-19 safety measures

During the normalization stage of the COVID-19 epidemic prevention and control, the safety threats caused by improper epidemic prevention measures of airlines have become the primary concern for air passengers. Negative e-WOM related to safety perception obtained based on online multimodal reviews of travel websites has become an important decision-making basis for potential air passengers when making airline choices. This study aims to examine the relationship between potential air passengers’ negative safety perception and the usefulness of online reviews, as well as to test the moderating effect of review modality and airline type. It also further explores the effectiveness and feasibility of applying big data sentiment analysis to e-WOM management. To this end, the theoretical model of negative safety perception, review modality, and airline type affecting review usefulness was constructed. Then we select 10 low-cost airlines and 10 full-service airlines, respectively, according to the number of reviews sorted by the TripAdvisor website, and use crawling techniques to obtain 10,485 reviews related to COVID-19 safety of the above companies from December 2019 to date, and conduct safety perception sentiment analysis based on Python’s Textblob library. Finally, to avoid data overdispersion, the model is empirically analyzed by negative binomial regression using R software. The results indicate that (1) Negative safety perception significantly and negatively affects review usefulness, that is, extreme negative safety perception can provide higher review usefulness for potential air passengers. (2) Review modality and airline type have a significant moderating effect on the relationship between negative safety perception and review usefulness, in which multimodal reviews and full-service airlines both weakened the negative impact of negative safety perception on review usefulness. The theoretical model in this paper is both an extension of the application of big data sentiment analysis techniques and a beneficial supplement to current research findings of e-WOM, providing an important reference for potential air passengers to identify useful reviews accurately and thus reduce safety risks in online decision-making.

Passengers' service perceptions emerging from user-generated content during the pandemic: the case of leading low-cost carriers

Purpose

Although a vast amount of research has been started to gauge customer satisfaction using surveys, the influence of COVID-19 on passengers' satisfaction has not received enough attention. Hence, the primary purpose of this research is to determine the dominant themes that emerged from airline travelers' online reviews and to determine attributes that are pertinent to the satisfaction of passengers flying with low-cost carriers (LCC) during the COVID-19 outbreak. In addition, this study investigates whether the salient themes of passengers' overall experiences vary by traveler origin, which may give more insight into airline sector market segmentation.

Design/methodology/approach

Leximancer software was used to construct concepts from words, followed by themes in the data analysis.

Findings

The analyses revealed eight themes in descriptions of “travel experiences” for airline passengers. These are “flights,” “staff,” “service,” “hygiene,” “cancellations,” “legroom,” “COVID-19” and “test”. Negative reviews associated with “cancellations,” “refund,” “waiting” and “baggage” (handling) concepts.

Originality/value

The findings provide important information about airline passengers' overall experiences. Limited studies have comprehensively considered various satisfaction categories of airline travelers using online reviews.

Estimating the Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on Customers’ Dining-Out Activities in South Korea

This study classified the types of dining-out activities into three categories: visiting restaurants, using delivery services, and using take-out services to understand how customers’ various dining-out activities were carried out during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study used the Theory of Planed Behavior (TPB) model to analyze the structural relationship between the main factors and three dining-out activities. An online survey method was used to distribute and collect survey link addresses through respondents’ SNS and e-mail and a data analysis was performed on the final 429(85.8%) effective samples. A paired t-test and structural equation modeling (SEM) were used to investigate customers’ dining-out activities. This study is of significant contribution in that it compared and analyzed customers’ various dining-out activities using the TPB model, laid the theoretical foundation for related research, and suggested ways to help related industry workers establish marketing strategies under the pandemic.

An Empirical Study of Passengers’ Perceived Satisfaction with Monorail Service Quality: Case of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

The aim of the current study was to examine passengers’ perceived satisfaction with a monorail system by determining the factors that dominated their perception. For this study, 417 data points were collected through face-to-face questionnaire surveys in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, from 20 September 2019 to 10 December 2019. The study involved the use of several assessments to ascertain how the perceived satisfaction of passengers with the monorail service was influenced. The tests predicted which service factors fuelled this satisfaction and included an exploratory factor analysis, Spearman’s correlation test and an artificial neural network (ANN) model (termed the multilayer perceptron neural networks model) with a feed-forward backpropagation algorithm. The findings that were produced by these methods of analysing factors revealed the extraction of eight service-quality features as the key influences on the perceived satisfaction of passengers. The correlation test results revealed that these factors have a significant and positive relationship with perceived satisfaction. Finally, the ANN model with the optimum neuron number in the hidden layer is seven neurons. This model found that the dominant service quality factors that contributed to influencing passengers’ perceived satisfaction levels were (i) the provision of information, (ii) facilities, (iii) signage. The results of this study will benefit service providers, policymakers and planners in formulating effective strategies to enhance passengers’ satisfaction with the monorail service and increase the ridership.

The Mediating Effects of Work-Life Balance (WLB) and Ease of Using WLB Programs in the Relationship between WLB Organizational Culture and Turnover Intention

Work–life balance (WLB) is an important concern for all workers irrespective of their age, sex, education level, family structure, or occupation. This study analyzes WLB’s mediating effects and the ease of using WLB programs in the relationship between WLB organizational culture of hotels and turnover intention of its culinary staff. We conducted a survey featuring 320 culinary staff members at hotels in Incheon from 10 to 30 August 2020 and performed statistical analysis using 290 responses. We find that the company’s willingness for WLB, empathetic communication with colleagues, material support of colleagues for WLB, and the ease of using WLB programs in organizational culture had a positive impact on WLB. The company’s willingness for WLB, boss’s consideration for WLB, empathetic communication with colleagues, and material support of colleagues for WLB in organizational culture had a negative impact on turnover intention. The ease of using WLB programs had no indirect effect on the relationship between organizational culture and turnover intention. However, WLB had an indirect effect on the relationship between the four components except for the boss’s consideration for WLB and turnover intention. Hotel management should create an organizational culture that supports the WLB of culinary staff.