abstract

In service sector industry, service quality along with price factor plays a very vital
role in influencing customer satisfaction. This paper tries to up bring the knowledge
about the same in FULL SERVICE AIRLINES and LOW COST AIRLINES. Service quality is

understood by the difference between the service expectation by the end users and service
received by them. There are several actors which influences the customers perception.
Perception of the customers directly or indirectly influences their level of satisfaction. The
aviation sector in INDIA is facing high competition in providing service quality and thus
providing customer satisfaction in order to get upper hands over its competitors.
Key words: Customer satisfaction, service quality, price, airline

introduction

In the last 25 years, this aviation sector has grown at a rapid speed. There are
several reasons which contributed to the growth of this sector like technological
advancement, its supportive role in world trade, international investment along with
tourism and thats why its rightly said that it act as center of globalization for other
industries. The growth of this industry has resulted in huge opportunities and
challenges to the business entities. The basic reason for such huge opportunities is
increase in demand of airline services. On the other hand challenges had increased
due high level of competition and customer demand of enhanced and better
services at a worth price. The growth in this sector had enabled government all over
the world to attract private airline participation. Asia Tourism Forum Conference
May,2012 2 These conditions cause all players in the airline industry require to
continuously innovate in terms of both services and technology used to deliver
services and better safety to the consumers (Ringle, Sarstedt, & Zimmermann,
2011; Roades & Waguespack Jr., 2008). Previously, the traditional airline which used
to provide full is currently live up by low cost airlines. On the other hand, the low
cost airline provides low fares and basic services but fails to provide additional
services provided by traditional airlines. Providing efficient service at lower cost low
cost airlines is posing a serious threat to traditional airline which provide full
services. This research paper tries to bring forward how service quality and price as
airlines competitive strategy influence consumer satisfaction in both low cost and
full service airlines.
Literature review
Satisfaction of passengers has emerged as most important factor Dennett, Ineson,
Stone, and Colgate (2000) increase in level of competition due to deregulation has
lead to increased attention towards service quality. (Lee and Cunningham, 1996)
came out with the act that airline companies also tried differentiate their services

through computerization which were also designed to develop customer loyalty in

distribution channel. However an extensive survey conducted by Ott (1993) reveled
that consumers hardly perceive any difference from one carrier to another.
Cronin and Taylor (1992) had argued that service quality actually act as antecedent
of customer satisfaction and also try to up bring the fact that perceived service
quality lets to ultimate consumer satisfaction. Bitner and Hubbert (1994) came out
with that result that service encounter satisfaction was quite distict from overall
determined that service encounter satisfaction was quite distinct from overall
satisfaction and perceived quality. Service quality will vary; the definitions are all
formulated from the customer perspective: that is, what customers perceive are
important dimensions of quality. Saha and Theingi (2009) pointed out that the
emergence of low cost airlines has raised concerns on how satisfied are the
customers with the services provided. Previous airline service studies are
concentrated in modeling the effect of perceived service quality at the aggregate
construct level, though examining the effects of individual dimensions of service
attributes has potentially great utility for airline managers(Patterson & Spreng,
1997).