An evaluation of airline service quality using the fuzzy weighted SERVQUAL method

The airline service quality is an important issue in the international air travel transportation industry. Although a number of studies focus on the subject of airline service quality evaluation in the past, most of these studies applied the SERVQUAL method to evaluate the airline service quality. But only few have attempted to evaluate the airline service quality using the weighted SERVQUAL method. Furthermore, human judgments are often vague and it is not easy for passengers to express the weights of evaluation criteria and the satisfaction of airline service quality using an exact numerical value. It is more realistic to use linguistic terms to describe the expectation value, perception value and important weight of evaluation criteria. Due to this type of existing fuzziness in the airline service quality evaluation, fuzzy set theory is an appropriate method for dealing with uncertainty. The subjective evaluation data can be more adequately expressed in linguistic variables. Thus this article attempts to fill this gap in the current literature by establishing a fuzzy weighted SERVQUAL model for evaluating the airline service quality. A case study of Taiwanese airline is conduced to demonstrate the effectiveness of the fuzzy weighted SERVQUAL model. Finally, some interesting conclusions and useful suggestions are given to airlines to improve the service quality. (C) 2010 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.