How Can Service Convenience Reestablish Passenger Satisfaction After a Flight Delay? A Data Mining Approach
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.47743/saeb-2026-0006Keywords:
airline consumer satisfaction, flight delays, machine learning, data mining, service failure.Abstract
The rapid development in aviation has transformed the way air travellers travel. Service failures, such as flight delays, significantly impact consumer satisfaction and its various dimensions. Consequently, flight delay has been identified as one of the critical factors in service failure. To improve satisfaction, airlines need to understand how consumer satisfaction can be enhanced in service failure incidents such as flight delays. As air travel recovers, understanding how service failures impact satisfaction and how they can be mitigated is crucial. Therefore, this study measures consumer airline satisfaction based on 129,880 observations of airline passengers (Study 1). It conducts data mining to predict that service convenience influences service failure perception (flight delay) and enhances consumer satisfaction (Study 2). The results indicate interesting trends. It is found that service convenience is the primary driver of delayed service failure recovery from the perspective of airline passengers. Airlines should invest in enhancing convenience and digital services, including virtual assistants, implementing automatic recovery mechanisms for flight delays, and considering the proximity of boarding gates to minimise walking distance.
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