Airline Service Failures : A study on relationships between lack of control, emotions, and negative word-of-mouth

Abstract: Service failure within the airline industry has been a prominent topic within the media. Each story of a failure features a disgruntled passenger. Emotions are already high during the consumption of any airline service, and a service failure will bring on а slew of unwanted emotions. The purpose of this paper is then to understand what type of relationship do these negative emotions and feelings of lack of control have after a service failure, and do any of those given emotions lead to negative word-of-mouth (NWOM). The method used to accomplish this is correlation hypothesis testing of survey results in relation to the specified negative emotions and the causal attribution theory of control, as well as analysis between the same emotions and NWOM, again using correlation tests. This aim will be achieved by breaking service failure down into five negative incidents that are referred to as service failure scenarios, namely: luggage handling, delayed/cancelled flight, missed flight due to factors beyond customers’ control, negative customer service at the airport, and negative service experience during the flight. The five scenarios are studied against six specified emotions which are anger, frustration, helplessness, nervousness, worry, and panic. The relationship between these emotions and lack of control is tested, then these same emotions are tested in regards to NWOM. The findings express a weak to moderate positive relationship between at least one of the emotions and lack of control in three of the scenarios, leading to the conclusion that customers’ lack of control over the situation increases the intensity of the emotions. In the findings for emotions and NWOM, four out of the six tested negative emotions lead to NWOM, which are anger, frustration, helplessness, and worry. This discovery proves that different emotions in different scenarios make people react in a different manner, and this leads to the conclusion that emotions should be tested separately and scenarios should be created to research the real intensity of the emotions in different situations, without grouping them into one.