An intergenerational investigation of air passengers’ emotions during tarmac delay

ABSTRACT

Flight delay and its various forms have attracted the attention of scholars, media and airline regulators. Besides understanding the financial and productivity impact of such delays to the airline industry, the need to examine the emotional aspect of the affected airline passengers cannot be overlooked. Hence, the major intent of this qualitative study is to describe the emotions elicited by tarmac delays among a select group of air passengers from an intergenerational perspective. Emotional expressions (n = 1728) indicated by the 250 respondents were visually summarized via tag cloud analysis. The dominant emotions surfaced in this study across generations are valuable inputs in crafting successful affective customer relationship and ground delay programmes in the spirit of customization, consistency and creativity.

KEYWORDS:

• Air passengers
• aviation industry
• passengers’ emotions
• tarmac delay
• generations X
• Y
• Z
• tag cloud analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrea Lorraine B. Bacena

Andrea Lorraine B. Bacena, Angela Mae B. Bihasa, Lean Joy A. Cadayong, Pauline Margareth A. Romulo completed with honors (Cum Laude) their Bachelor of Science in Travel Management from the University of Santo Tomas, Manila, The Philippines.

Allan B. De Guzman

Allan B. de Guzman handles management and research courses at both graduate and undergraduate levels in the University of Santo Tomas.  As a prolific writer, he has extensively published a total of 162 articles in various ISI-listed journals and at the same time serves as editor, board member and reviewer in international journals.  He has received various prestigious awards which included the 2007 SEAMEO-JASPER Research Award given by the Government of Canada and the Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO), the 2006 National Research Council of the Philippines Achievement Award, the 2011 Metrobank Foundation Outstanding Teacher in Higher Education.  He was the recipient of the 2014 Australian Awards Fellowship, Queenland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia.