The result of H03 is well aligned with those for H02. The factors that
mostly impact passenger satisfaction are cabin features, crew and pilot
performance, and inflight food and drink, and airlines that perform
well on these areas aremost likely towin the loyalty of their customers.
To test the hypothesis of H04, that the passengers' satisfaction ratings
for specified elements of their journeys were correlated with
their advocacy, correlation coefficients are presented in Table 9. All
but two of the coefficients were statistically significant at p b0.05, so
the alternative hypothesis was accepted — that passenger satisfaction
affects their level of advocacy for the flown airline.
When all the airlineswere combined by continent of origin (denoted
by ‘All 15’ in Table 9) the elements of the journey that were most
strongly (but only moderately) correlated with advocacy were, in
order of magnitude, cabin features (rho = 0.520); inflight food
and drink (rho = 0.511); crew and pilots (rho = 0.504); seat features
(rho= 0.487) and IFE (rho= 0.468). The correlations between advocacy
and the ratings for arrival, website services, boarding/departure and
check in were consistently weak (rho = 0.290 to 0.466) for all the airlines.
Flight delay consistently exhibited little or no correlation, or a
veryweak correlation,with the advocacy ratings across all of the airlines
(rho= 0.030 to 0.119). This result suggests that passengers do not necessarily
stop advocating an airline that delays them. The reasons for delays
may be too diverse for passengers to directly blame their airline
with a delay. This must be encouraging for airlines that suffer inmarkets
where poor weather, or air traffic limitations may affect on time
performance