Research On Flight Delay Services Recovery Based On The Passenger’s Demand

Because of the three advantages of the modern civil aviation:speed, safety and comfort, more and more people are choosing air planes as their top travelling vehicle in order to save time and improve life quality and efficiency. The World Trade Organization membership, as well as an accelerating globalized economy, has opened China’s civil aviation industry even wider to the outside world. As major foreign airlines are flocking into the domestic market, local players have seen huge challenges. Therefore, it is absolutely crucial for the plane to leave on time, or else its beneficial features will not be seen and experienced by the passengers. However, nowadays flight delays become quite common and serious in China, which may lead to disappointment and dissatisfaction among passengers, even causing conflicts with airlines.Flight delays of all weak links remain the biggest concern that leads to most of the passengers’complaints. Given all that, improvement along this line deserves a top position of the industry’s agenda. If and only if passengers’needs are analyzed, the satisfaction rate is improved, can local airlines see the prospect of surviving the fierce competition.The extensive reference to the existing literature on flight delay services has found that most of the researches were about passenger satisfaction and compensatory measures, and passengers’needs are hardly attended to. In addition, few analyses are made to know the different causes of the flight delay which result in varied passenger needs.This thesis focuses on one link of an airline’s operational chain-service responses to flight delays-in search of passengers’needs, and offers services specific to their needs to ease passengers’dissatisfaction. The thesis, upon Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and service marketing theories, develops a few workable suggestions to guide airline services catering to different scenarios, adjusting operation strategies and service methodology, improving the service competence and qualities to meet the needs of passengers, thus enabling airlines to offer practical solutions to the benefit of both passengers and airlines.