Relationship among service quality, customer satisfaction, and behavioral intentions in Vietnam low-cost airlines industry

Abstract

With the overall purpose is to clarify the relationships among service quality, customer satisfaction and passengers’ behavioral intentions in the two Low-cost airlines businesses in Vietnam, the study was conduct with the sample size of 340 passengers having experience of using Vietnam Low-cost airline service. The data collected was to test the hypotheses about the relationships among the three constructs: Service quality, customer satisfaction and behavioral intentions. The study uses Structure equation modeling to analyze data for the complex model proposed with the support of Cronbach’s coefficient alpha reliability test, exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis. The findings of the study is that There exists a positive relationship between service quality and customer satisfaction and between satisfaction and behavioral intentions. The study finds that the passenger satisfaction with ground-staff and schedule has the lowest level compared to flight staff and tangibles, which lead to a suggestion that the managers of Low-cost airline service providers in Vietnam must pay more attention to improve the flight schedule and the service provided by the ground staff. The study also finds that the service quality has an indirect effect on behavioral intentions through satisfaction. As behavioral intentions of passengers are the target of the business, improving the service quality (mainly through four dimensions: Tangibles, flight schedule, flight attendants and ground staff) helps improve the customer satisfaction about the service and hence, customers tend to have behavioral intentions (word-of mouth or feedback) toward the service they experienced. The study still has some limitations by the generalization of the findings. Therefore, future research related to this industry should examine again the consistency of the model tested in this study to the market at certain location.