The Relationship Between Service Quality and Customer Satisfaction in the Airline Industry: A Meta-Analysis Study

Introduction

Service quality has been a critical consideration for airlines in the competitive global market (Shah et al., 2020). As such, providing superior service is essential for airlines to remain competitive in the market. Providing high-quality service is a requirement for airlines and helps customers stay loyal to the airline. Furthermore, ensuring customer satisfaction, which is decisive in the success of airlines, depends on the high-quality service delivery of airlines (Hussain et al., 2015). Customer satisfaction is one of the important criteria for the performance of profit-oriented organizations, especially airlines. Therefore, airlines attach importance to providing high-quality service to increase customer satisfaction and ultimately improve their revenues (Chow & Fung, 2018).

Given the highly competitive and demanding nature of the airline industry today, many airlines prioritize service quality to maximize customer satisfaction (Basfirinci & Mitra, 2015). As service quality is key to the survival of airlines and customer satisfaction is a crucial marketing outcome due to its impact on customer loyalty and purchase intention, these concepts have drawn the attention of practitioners and academics (Ali et al., 2015). As such, the relationship between service quality and customer satisfaction has also been frequently studied in the airline industry in different contexts (Hapsari et al., 2017; Hussain et al., 2015; Shah et al., 2020; Shen & Yahya, 2021; Suki, 2014). Sanchez-Rebull et al. (2018), at this point, suggested that service quality is one of the key antecedents of customer satisfaction. However, when the literature is examined, it is observed that scholars deal with the relationship between service quality and customer satisfaction through different business models, different geographical regions, and different sample sizes. Independent investigations on a similar topic in social and behavioral sciences generally lead to mixed findings (Sarkar et al., 2020). To overcome this shortcoming, meta-analysis attempts to discover the truth by statistically combining all studies that focus on conceptually similar relationships (Tamilmani et al., 2019). When the link between service quality and customer satisfaction in the airline industry is examined, no work has been identified that investigates the total effect size of this relationship by reviewing the existing literature. Therefore, this chapter aims to integrate the findings of independent studies with the meta-analysis approach in order to calculate the overall effect size of service quality on customer satisfaction in the global airline industry. The research questions that this chapter seeks to answer are:

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  Does service quality have an effect on customer satisfaction?

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  What is the overall effect size of the relationship between service quality and customer satisfaction?

While the body of knowledge on the airline industry can be traced back decades, there has been no effort to summarize the findings on this relationship in the literature quantitatively. Therefore, this chapter has the potential to provide a literature-needed summary of the relationship between current critical variables.