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ABSTRACT Twenty five years of measuring airline service quality or why is airline service quality only good when times are bad?

The headline for a National Public Radio article (Memmott, 2013) about the 2013 Airline Quality Rating (AQR at http://www. airlinequalityrating .com) report notes a fundamental contradiction in U.S. airline service quality, namely, the fact that the AQR results remain near all-time high levels for service quality delivered while customer complaints are “soaring.” Customer complaints to the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) are one of the four areas that comprise the AQR system with the other airline service quality measurements being on-time performance, denied boardings, and baggage problems. The difficulty with this type of reporting is that so few consumers actually complain to the DOT where the complaint numbers are generated. An examination of the Air Travel Consumer Report (ATCR at http://www. dot. gov/airconsumer/air-travel-consumer-reports), the source of the data for the AQR, would reveal the fact that the complaint rate for all of 2012 was 15,335 complaints out of 51,618,136 passenger enplanements or a 00.0297 percentage. In 2011 there were 11,546 complaints out of 45,686,141 passenger enplanements or a 00.0252 percentage. While the story correctly notes “complaints last year rose 22 percent in 2012,” the actual percentage difference in the number of complaints between the years, there is a miniscule percentage difference when one uses enplaned passengers as the denominator for the actual percentage rate. This example demonstrates a problem with examining only one of the service factors reported by the ATCR. The rates reported by the National Public Radio story and the AQR do not reflect the relatively small absolute magnitude of the change in complaint behavior. Another annual report, the J.D. Power Airline Satisfaction Study (2013), found one of the highest levels of satisfaction with airline service since 2006, although passengers who reported paying baggage fees reported overall lower levels of satisfaction. Past research has shown little relationship between the AQR report and the J.D. Power Satisfaction Study (Waguespack & Rhoades, 2009). The difficulty in understanding and comparing airline service quality reports arises from the varying systems of measuring service quality available. The AQR uses secondary airline operational data reported to the DOT, while J.D. Power relies on a national sampling process that considers a variety of additional service quality indicators. Both measures provide only a snapshot of U.S. airline service quality without placing the airlines into a broader service context. Thus, it appears within the U.S. an industry that normally ranks near the bottom of the annual American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI at http://www.theacsi .org) when compared to other industrial segments and once ranked below the U.S. Internal Revenue Service in customer satisfaction in the ASCI can remain at near all-time highs in ‘quality’ depending on what you measure and who you ask (ACSI, 2013; J.D. Power, 2013; Yu, 2007). If U.S. customers are more satisfied with their experience at the taxman’s office than their airline counter, then where is the quality? What do these measures of ‘quality’ represent? What does it say about U.S. consumers and airlines?