Perceived Service Quality in Airline Services: An Empirical Assessment

In today’s world of fierce competition, service sector organizations strive to stay ahead by offering quality services to their customers and aviation industry is no exception to this. Since the air transportation market has become more challenging, many airlines have turned to focus on airline service quality so as to have sustained growth and profitability. In view of the growing importance of service quality, the present study was undertaken to measure the service quality of airline service providers in Kashmir. To achieve this, a well structured questionnaire was designed in line with SERVPERF scale to capture the opinion of the passengers about the services rendered to them. A sample of 402 airline passengers was chosen at International Airport, Srinagar on the basis of number of statements in a questionnaire as propounded by Hair, et. al., (2010). The study concludesthat the passengers are relatively satisfied with their overall quality of airline services; however, an improvement is needed in one of the dimension of service quality namely inflight service so as to enhance the overall quality of airline services. The study recommends that airline operators should recognize the changing needs of passengers and customize their range of services particularly inflight services by identifying unique service requirements of the individual passengers according to their desires.