How Has COVID-19 Affected Airline Passenger Satisfaction? Evaluating The Passenger Satisfaction of European Short-Haul Low-Cost Carriers Pre- and Post-COVID-19

Abstract

This paper investigates whether there has been a change in passenger satisfaction drivers for the three largest short-haul low-cost carriers in Europe before and after COVID-19. User-generated content on the Skytrax platform was used as the data source for passenger satisfaction, and these secondary data were scraped using the Web Scraper tool. Binary logistic regression was used for the classification model related to passenger satisfaction, and ROC analysis was used to evaluate the classification performance of the model. The findings suggested that the service attributes of seat comfort, cabin staff services, and ground services are significant predictors of value for money, and the value for money is a significant determinant of overall satisfaction in both periods. Additionally, it was revealed that ground service is the most important determinant of the value for money perception. The results also indicate that in the post-COVID-19 period, the predictive power of seat comfort has decreased while the predictive power of ground services has increased.