Evaluating service quality of airline industry using hybrid best worst method and VIKOR

Fierce competition and shrinking profits have impelled the airlines to stress upon improving the quality of the services being provided to the customers. Customers have become very specific about their service needs and often tend to shift to others that provide better services. Indian aviation industry is growing exponentially with customer base growing to 223.6 million in 2016 from 73.4 million in 2006. Service quality is an important research topic but the studies conducted so far have used basic SERVQUAL model and also there is limited studies in Indian airline context. So there is need to identify and then prioritize the service quality attributes for airline industry. Best worst method is used to rank and prioritize attributes of service quality that were identified through extensive literature review and VIKOR (VlseKriterijuska Optimizacija I Komoromisno Resenje) methodology is used to rank the best airline with respect to these attributes. Tangibility, Reliability, security and safety and Ticket pricing are found to be most important attributes of service quality and further analysis using VIKOR methodology suggests that airline 2 is performing well on these attributes among the five airlines taken for study. The service quality attributes identified through extensive literature review and results obtained through MCDM analysis are fruitful for airline managers to address service quality issues. Further, scope of future research work and implications for airline industry managers have been discussed at the end to conclude the paper. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.