The Relationship between Service Failure and Service Recovery with Airline Passenger Satisfaction

Abstract

Service failure and service recovery of a firm can greatly influence on customer satisfaction as well as the relationship quality with the firm, regardless of other firm's efforts to establish the strong relationships with its customers in the long run. Airline companies particularly struggled with numerous obstacles regarding their continuity to survive. One of the problems is they are accountable to service failures which is unavoidable to evade. This research aims to recognize the relationship of service failure and service recovery with AirAsia passenger satisfaction. The data was gathered from 361 domestic passengers departing from Sultan Ismail Petra Airport, Kelantan. The convenience sampling has been employed as the sampling approach for this study. The findings indicated that the service failure has negative significant relationship with passenger satisfaction while the service recovery has positively influenced passenger satisfaction. The implications of this study are the management team and staff should plan effective recovery instruments to correct the failures such as well-planned corrective actions, effective apologies, willing to be responsible for failure occurred and other actions. The frontline employees should be aware of the customers' emotions when the service failure happens, and the excellent recovery effort can thus prevent negative emotion of customers.