The Influence of Service Quality and Passenger Satisfaction on Behavioral Intention (The Case of Ethiopian Airlines)
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Date
2014-05
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship among perceived service quality,
passenger satisfaction and behavioral intention through a case analysis of Ethiopian Airlines. A
structured questionnaire was developed. The hypotheses were simultaneously tested on a sample
of 304 customers out of 385 distributed, giving a valid response rate of 79 percent. Several
analytical techniques were used to assess the relationships among the variables under
investigation such as paired sample t-test, simple, and multiple linear regressions, structural
equation modeling and importance performance analysis. Hierarchical regression was used to
assess the mediating role of passenger satisfaction on the relationship between perceived service
quality and behavioral intention. The applications used to analyze and examine the hypotheses
are the Statistical Package for Social Sciences V.21 and Analysis of Moment Structures V.21.
The findings of this study have shown a significant effect of perceived service quality and
passenger satisfaction on passengers’ behavioral intentions at the level of (α ≤ 0.05) as well as a
significant effect of perceived service quality on passengers’ satisfaction at the level of (α ≤
0.05). The mean scores of passengers’ perceived service quality of Ethiopian airlines for all the
nine dimensions range from 3.16 to 3.97 indicating that passengers feel that quality of service
being offered by Ethiopian airlines is more than average. Yet, the result of gap analysis shows
that there is still a significant negative difference between perceived service quality and
passengers’ expectation. The IPA, a two-dimensional grid, is broken into four categories to
highlight important areas for improvement to enable each of the perceived service quality
dimensions to be plotted into the grid. It is a clear and powerful evaluation tool for Ethiopian
Airlines to find out attributes that are doing well and attributes that need to be improved, which
require action immediately. The results are useful in identifying areas for strategic focus to help
the airline’s future customer service strategy. As evident from the finding section that the study
was conducted in Ethiopia only, applicability of the results in other countries may result
differently. Further, as the study is conducted in the airlines industry, application of the same in
other industries, like; education, financial, and health may not come up with the same findings
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Keywords
service quality, customer satisfaction, customer expectation