Voice of airline passenger: A text mining approach to understand customer satisfaction

Eren Sezgen, Keith J. Mason and Robert Mayer

Journal of Air Transport Management, 2019, vol. 77, issue C, 65-74

Abstract: This paper investigates the key drivers of customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction towards both, full-service and low-cost carriers and also towards, economy and premium cabins. Latent Semantic Analysis - a text mining and categorisation technique ─ is applied to analyse online user-generated airline reviews. Over five thousand passenger reviews for fifty (50) airlines were collected from the online review site, TripAdvisor. Findings show that there are fundamental differences in the drivers of passenger satisfaction depending on the class of air travel purchased, and whether the airline is a low cost or a full service carrier. Friendliness and helpfulness of staff are the key factors for those travelling in Economy Class, product value is key for those in premium cabins, and a low price is the key satisfaction driver for those that choose to travel on a low cost airline. The research also shows that the service attributes seat comfort and legroom, luggage/flight disruptions and staff behaviours are the main reasons for passengers’ dissatisfaction among all groups. This study provides an alternative customer satisfaction analysis for managers to hear the voice of their customers by using a well-established text mining technique and by analysing the reviews of satisfied and dissatisfied customers.

Keywords: Customer satisfaction; Text mining; Airlines; Latent semantic analysis; Marketing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (30)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0969699718304873
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jaitra:v:77:y:2019:i:c:p:65-74

DOI: 10.1016/j.jairtraman.2019.04.001

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Air Transport Management is currently edited by Anne Graham

More articles in Journal of Air Transport Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().