Creating a Short Scale for In-flight Experience Quality

Customer service and satisfaction is of great importance to aviation industry as it has an economic impact on the airlines. Customer’s in-flight experience, is tied into their satisfaction with that airline, and in turn has become an area of competition between airlines. This study seeks to develop a statistically valid and reliable scale to empirically measure the quality of the in-flight experience that a passenger would witness on a commercial airline flight within the United States. Actual consumers from the general public were used for each of the five stages of the process, along with input from aviation experts, to generate items for the scale, narrow down the list of items to those most relevant to in-flight experience quality, and test the final scale for validity, reliability and discriminability. A factor analysis using the principle components and varimax rotation loaded strongly on one factor, providing evidence for validity. Reliability was tested via Cronbach’s Alpha and Guttmann’s Split-half tests, indicating high consistency and reliability. The final scale that was developed contained eight items, which were good condition, arrived on time, comfortable chairs, air conditioning was favorable, clean smelling air, comfortable cabin temperature, comfortable seat spacing, good customer service.