The Effects of Service Recovery Justice from Flight Delays on Value Perception and Satisfaction

Abstract

As one of the most challenging disruption issues for Chinese airlines, flight delay and its influence on consumers’ emotional and behavioral reactions are scrutinized in this current study. Service recovery justice, which is the keystone for alleviating the delay disruption, is selected as the main predictor of satisfaction. In fact, for marketers and consumer behaviorists, gaining new customers is likely more costly than retaining old customers. Thus, failures in the recovery service process cannot but generate more critical outcomes such as negative value perceptions and dissatisfaction. This is a window into the theory-based research that basically tackles the direct effects of perceived recovery justice on satisfaction. The purpose of the research is to explain these relationships and draw conclusions that might be useful for airline managers and customer behavior researchers. The study essentially emphasizes on Chinese passengers who have experienced delays in four domestic and international carriers that are Air China, China Eastern Airlines, China Western Airlines, and Shanghai Airlines. Thus, the investigation is conducted in an idiosyncratic way so as to better understand factors such as consumption emotions, negative value perception and satisfaction from the flight service delivery. A mixed-model research of data collection method was adopted and the data analysis was performed mainly with the use of structural equation modeling (SEM). The results show that most of the fit indexes are acceptable and all the hypotheses are supported in the structural model. Practical implications include a significant contribution of this research in demonstrating the relationship between the three dimensions of flight delays recovery justice that are interactional, procedural, distributive justice and other key constructs such as consumption emotions, negative perceived value, dissatisfaction, and eventually satisfaction. The research could be subject to different probability sampling techniques so as to be able to generalize the results and draw inferences from the model.

Keywords: Service Recovery Justice, Flight Delay, Value Perception, Satisfaction, China.