An online survey for the quality assessment of airlines' services

The growing competition between the airlines has driven them to customer centered strategies. Knowing how users evaluate the quality of service is important to direct the marketing strategies. Customer Satisfaction Surveys (CSS) are carried out just for this purpose. This paper aims to define how the design of a CSS questionnaire should be conducted. After a preliminary draft of the questionnaire, a panel of experts was contacted for collecting suggestions to improve it. People who travelled by air were requested to evaluate some aspects of the services provided by the airlines. Two different evaluation scales were adopted: one for asking a judgment about the quality of each service aspect, and one for asking a level of satisfaction with it. Then, a Pilot Survey (PS) was launched to refine the survey design and to verify the convenience of using two evaluation scales and/or to define the best scale to be adopted. Finally, the results registered from the large-scale survey revealed that the use of both the evaluation scales is convenient and useful for discovering the different perceptions of users and specifically their satisfaction level in relation to their judgments on each service aspect.