A new framework for passenger experience

Abstract

Passenger experience is getting more and more attention among airline companies.1 Airline companies are facing new demands for designing better passenger experiences to insure their future survivability in this competitive industry. However, very little is known on what passengers really need during flight.2 Passenger comfort has been the subject of numerous studies for decades. That is because it influences on passengers’ wellbeing, satisfaction, system acceptance and consequently choices of future.3 Even though comfort plays a great role on passenger experience, comfort definitions are usually rather vague and general. Also, despite the fuzziness of the concept, a number of common issues are agreed upon in the literature which are best described by De Looze et al.,4 as follows: a. Comfort is a construct with subjective and personal elements, b. Various factors influence comfort (psychological, physiological and physical), c. Comfort is a reaction to the environment. In this paper, we introduce a new approach for defining passenger experience. We base passenger experience on the ‘activities’ that passenger do during flight. Each activity, whether it is a rule-based activity (listening to crew announcements) or optional-based activity (watching IFE etc) act as experience components that all together create the overall passenger experience. Several studies confirm that before redesigning the interior or in-flight services, it is useful to elicit passengers’ knowledge on their experience related to various in-flight activities.5,6 Also, Smulders et al.,6 and Lille et al.,1 showed that passenger satisfaction could be a result of what passengers tend to do. We also offer a new model on how these activities in addition to various factors lead to specific passenger experiences.