Airline industry has always been famous for its continuous struggle: cutting costs, managing fluctuating demand, keeping up with tight quality requirements while trying to maintain superior services and satisfy needs of various customer groups. Customer satisfaction has been on very low levels for decades. According to American Customer Satisfaction Index, airline industry scores lowest out of 47 other industries. However, the demand for air transportation has been stable and despite current economic crisis and such events as September 11, the growth reached 7.8% in 2011 (Datamonitor, 2011). In this struggling environment, airlines are forced to shift their focus towards customer oriented service quality (Chang &Yeh, 2002).
It is extremely important for carriers not only to understand the perception of passengers of their service offerings, but as well find out what customers expect from the services (Chen & Chang, 2005) and what kind of services customers consider most important. In the airline industry, services are composed of very complex mix of intangibles as the airlines sell not physical objects but performances and experiences (Gursoy et al., 2005). Thus, service quality is a key to attract and keep loyal customers (Liou&Tzang, 2007; Chang &Yeh, 2002). This project views service experience as a process, starting with a search for a ticket and ending with post-flight services. All the steps a customer is taking during air transportation are listed and discussed. Service quality is created on each step of the process, and it is important to understand the customer preferences and expectations from the services. Evaluation of customer expectations based on two to five key quality requirements and analyzed using statistical methods to understand its relative importance to a target customer group chosen for a survey.
