Classification trees for analysing highly educated people satisfaction with airlines’ services

Passengers’ satisfaction has relevant implications in air transport system. This study wants to provide further insights in this field in order to give managers and practitioners simple and explanatory results that allow them to increase passengers’ satisfaction. The paper explores passengers’ satisfaction with airline services through the Classification and Regression Tree (CART) approach together with the Importance Performance Analysis (IPA). CART approach allows identifying the relevance of each service factor affecting user’s satisfaction, while IPA merges the CART results with the satisfaction directly expressed by the passengers in order to identify the most critical factors. A sample of passengers travelling by direct flights has been used. The results show that passengers have great expectations in terms of staff competence and courtesy, while seem less concerned about comfort on board. In addition, as it emerges from the IPA, some services, such as boarding and landing operations, should be improved.