Abstract:

This paper analyses why past efforts to raise air passengers' satisfaction have not helped most airlines to differentiate themselves from competitors. Using years of historical and current data collected in the airline industry, the paper demonstrates how each individual attribute can impact overall satisfaction in very different ways. In fact, only a few attributes have a linear impact (as is too often deduced from statistical models). Furthermore, corrective actions that only take into account the degree of importance of an attribute, whilst ignoring a potential asymmetry of its impact, often result in poor ROI.