BIG DATA APPLICATION IN AIRLINE INDUSTRY TO IMPROVE

CUSTOMER SATISFACTION
ADARSH S(DA) ,ANN MARY PAUL(DA) ,MANONMANI P L(MI), NABILA S(DA),SABREENA JOB(DA)

The airline industry was from the beginning an expert in customer experience with its successful loyalty
programs. They have access to great data, and with prioritization in data collection and analysis, even
smaller airlines could use big data to respond to market trends and customer needs. Big Data helps
airlines have a better understanding of the individual passenger, identify patterns in his/her behavior,
determine preferences and foresee future requests. By utilizing Big Data insights, airlines have the
ability to make strategic decisions and differentiate themselves in the extremely competitive market.

[1] This study investigates airline passenger behavior by analyzing three types of travel data: passenger
name record (PNR), share of wallet (SOW) and web trends data to explore passenger behavior of
websites and mobile usage. PNR, SOW & webtrends will be joined by the user's identity with the
addition of user name and the order number, then be imported into the big data platform to provide
useful insights for the airlines company. The PNR can reflect the characteristics of the user's travel, like
how often the user travels, which place the user travels most, etc.; the SOW can reflect the user's loyalty
to the airline. Based on their age difference, the no. of travel together, customer value, the network
value, product activities, the relationship of Weibo etc., we can deduce the relationship between them,
such as family, colleague relationship etc. SOW analysis in PNR social networks is done by first, the
journey piecing up, passengers’ all journeys should be put in order. Next, analysis about if every
passenger journey is a round trip during a certain time. Lastly, inference of passengers. A key factor in
the success of service business is the customer happiness index and a service provider stands out by the
customer experience that it offers. Combining visitor and customer interactions across all channels from
information search to purchase, this study demonstrates how to develop a 360-degree view of passenger
behavior based on real-time travel behavior data. The findings shed new light on airline precision
marketing and customer relationship management. Airline companies can design corresponding
marketing segmentation and promotion strategies based on better understanding passenger travel
patterns, preference and their social networks.

[2] Social media actions such as liking and commenting are increasing at an exponential rate and are
proxies for consumer’s attention to a particular product and the shared digital artefact can create social
influence. This research aimed to investigate to what extent Turkish Airlines utilizes their Facebook
page to improve its performance metrics by utilizing the content of Turkish Airlines Facebook page, and
investigating whether business data such as passenger numbers, revenue and stock prices can be
estimated by examining the size, activity and sentiment content of Turkish Airlines’ Facebook page. It
focuses mainly on likelihood of purchase in order to track public viewpoints of the Airlines and examine
whether such viewpoints can perform trend prediction in revenue streams and stock prices. The
Facebook data consisting of textual data such as post comments were fetched by SODATO (social data
analytics tool) and applied using supervised machine learning to classify the posts and comments on the
Facebook page. Multidimensional Text Analytics Tool (Mutato) was used to perform the likelihood of a
customer and to conduct a keyword analysis of the most occurring words on Turkish Airlines’ Facebook
page and then compared to the likelihood of purchases. Simple predictive analytics were performed with
the use of p-value and R-squared and scatter plots were chosen to visualize it to show how much one
variable was affected by another. The data analysis inferred most users who commented or posted on the
Facebook page
were considered ’likely’ purchasers and keyword analysis of the entire text corpus from the Turkish
Airlines Facebook page, showed an overall positive sentiment. Facebook likes were analyzed as well,
with focus on the specific type of reaction of the like button. Considering this, this paper looked at the
different reactions made for Turkish Airlines’ posts to see if a focus on users with more feelings towards
posts would have an impact on business data. The findings have shown that there is no reliable
relationship between Turkish Airlines Facebook data and their business data. However, Turkish
Airlines’ Facebook data can be used to assess customer satisfaction of the service quality, a valuable
aspect, as this measure could potentially improve likelihood of future purchases. This will be possible in
the short-term, and by utilizing big social data to understand customer satisfaction Turkish Airlines’
might be able to improve their sales figures.

[3] Several types of data were collected including the airline brand, type of aircraft, location of
departure, destination, type of traveler, seat type, date flown, overall satisfaction rating along with
additional ratings of seat comfort, staff, F&B, inflight entertainment, ground service, value for money,
and the textual reviews with title and content with recommendation using web crawling. The overall
satisfaction rating score was defined as the customer satisfaction in this study. The one-way analysis of
variance (ANOVA) was used to analyze the mean difference between the average customer satisfaction
with individual brands, and the method of Duncan was used for the post-hoc test. The Netdraw is an
illustration program to express how the frequent words are related and make an impact with certain
interaction. The last step of the analysis is CONCOR analysis. It helps segments of upper frequent words
and visualizes the segmentation of higher frequent words so that frequently used words belong to any
particular category. For the quantitative analysis, the evaluation data on six factors (seat comfort, staff,
F&B, entertainment, ground service, value for money) with customer satisfaction and recommendation
from Skytrax were collected. Using the SPSS Statistics program, it conducted a linear regression
analysis and verified the impact of each factor and the customer satisfaction.

[4] This paper utilizes the strategy of factors that influence passenger’s satisfaction and behavioral
intentions in international air travels. The study examines which dimensions have a positive influence on
service quality and which dimensions have the most and least important impact on service quality of
international air travel. This study is based on the analysis of a sample of 428 respondents, and identified
seven dimensions, i.e. Assurance, Timeliness, Convenience, Helpfulness, Comfort, Meals, Safety and
Security. From these dimensions Safety and Security is the most important dimension, and Timeliness is
the least important one. The study also reveals that passengers perception of air travel service quality
will differ based on their age, gender, income, occupation, and marital status. A questionnaire which is
divided into five sections, the first four section asked respondents to evaluate their overall experiences
from their last airline flight, and last section contained questions regarding respondents’
sociodemographic characteristics (age, purpose of visit, gender….) was carried out and Indata collection
sample of at least 387 respondents was considered as it provided a 95% confidence interval. Exploratory
Factor Analysis was used to examine the service quality dimensions and oblique rotations was carried
out and for testing certain hypothesis, Multiple Regression Analysis was used and thereby the dependent
and independent variables were classified and Pearson Correlation test showed the significant positive
relationship exists between certain quality dimensions. Not only that, For checking whether the
passengers have different perception with difference in socio-demographic characteristics, ANOVA and
Student's t-tests was taken into account. There are limitations though Big data as per this study provides
a no: of contributions and implications for marketing research on international air travel depending on
the sample which was taken , the age group, the gender as these demographic characteristics could limit
the generalization of the results to other age groups and occupations.

[5] This paper investigates the linkages among service quality, service provider image, customer
expectations, perceived value, customer satisfaction and brand loyalty in a Dubai-based airline. Dubai,
being a magnet for tourists and shoppers, the no: of people visiting Dubai through airlines in 2012 was
about 10 million in 2012. As high-quality service being the requirement for competition among airlines
the need for providing service quality became vital. Initially, the determinants of service quality were
identified utilizing the SERVQUAL framework with some modification. Service quality was then used
as an antecedent to measure customer satisfaction, a condition which can bring about brand loyalty. In a
research initiative using a quantitative approach, data from 253 questionnaires was analyzed. Using
structural equation modeling, the data analysis suggests that service quality, perceived value, and brand
image have a positive significant impact on customer satisfaction, which can in turn lead to brand
loyalty. To test the model’s fit, the chi square test static was used. Along with that other assessment such
as GFI, SRMR, RMSEA was considered and all showed a good fit. Data was analyzed using conformity
factor analysis and to fit the result to a single service quality construct, PCA with varimax rotation was
carried out and fit of the model seemed acceptable. Overall, the study identifies the contributing factors
as well as the outcomes of airline passengers' satisfaction with service, and concludes that superior
service quality, good corporate image, and perceived value lead to passenger satisfaction, which will in
turn yield a further outcome, brand loyalty. Due to the similar culture, the research findings can also be
applied in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. The data collected concerned just one airline,
raising questions about the generalizability of the results though the model identified in the research was
a good fit. Thus further research, including whether customer satisfaction plays either a mediating or a
moderating role between an independent variable and a dependent variable would be convenient.

References:

[1] “Understanding Airline Passenger Behavior through PNR, SOW and Webtrends Data Analysis” ​S Chen,
J Zhu, Q Xie, W Huang, Y Huang 2015 IEEE First International Conference on Big Data Computing Service and
Applications.

[2] “Analysing Customer Engagement of Turkish Airlines Using Big Social Data” Fie Sternberg, Kasper
Hedegaard Pedersen, Niklas Klve Ryelund, Raghava Rao Mukkamala, ​Ravi HYPERLINK
"https://research.cbs.dk/en/persons/ravi-vatrapu"​Vatrapu​, ​Department of Digitalization​.

[3] “Understanding Customer Experience and Satisfaction through Airline Passengers’ Online Review”
Hyun-Jeong Ban and Hak-Seon Kim, ​School of Hospitality and Tourism Management, Kyungsung University, 309
Suyoungro, Nam-Gu, Busan 48434, Korea.

[4] “An empirical analysis of customer satisfaction in international air travel” ​Michael D. Clemes, Christopher
Gan, Tzu-Hui Kao and Michelle Choong (2008),Innovative Marketing.

[5] “​Service quality and customer satisfaction of a UAE-based airline: An empirical ​Investigation” ​Rahim
Hussain, Amjad Al Nasser, Yomna K. Hussain , University of Dubai, United Arab Emirate​.