| Abstract: | Airline industry is by its inherent nature very prone to international competition. Because of deregulation and globalization, customers are now better informed about the optional services that are available as well as about their rights in getting these services. Unless airlines measure and monitor their service quality and hence the degree of customer satisfaction, they may lose their customers for good to other competitors and risk reduction of revenue or being out of business altogether. Service quality at Ethiopian Airlines is not properly measured and monitored. The purpose of this study is to measure the service quality of Ethiopian Airlines as perceived by its customers using the 22 components of SERVQUAL model. These 22 components are categorized under five dimensions consisting of tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy. Questionnaires have been developed in both Amharic and English which were distributed to passengers of selected routes representing the four major continents that the airline has been flying for years. Convenient sampling technique was used and feedback received from 165 respondents has been analyzed using SPSS package.
The findings revealed that ET’s service quality in all the five dimensions are above 4.92 and that the expectations in these dimensions are even higher. Among the five dimensions reliability which includes respecting arrival and departure time is perceived by passengers to be the lowest performance area for the airline and it is also a dimension where expectation of customers is the highest. On the other hand Assurance is a dimension where ET’s service is perceived to be relatively better. Among the individual components, ET’s services in the area of neatness of employees, safety of transactions and courtesy of employees are perceived to be among the best performance areas of the airlines. On the other hand, visual appeal of physical facility, advising customers about the service time and respecting schedule are perceived to be among the weak performance areas. Hence, it is recommended for the airline to focus and address areas of the widest perceived gap on priority, measure service quality on periodic basis, and monitor progress. The airline should also try to get information on the performance of its competitors and gear its customer relations strategy in a bid to better satisfy the needs of its customers and keep them loyal for good. |
