COVID-19: transforming air passengers’ behaviour and reshaping their expectations towards the airline industry

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 crisis has hindered travelling and transformed air passengers’ expectations, which profoundly impacted airlines, affecting tourism-related activities. Therefore, it is essential to determine the air passenger's perception regarding the airline services that create positive and negative opinions. Accordingly, this research note (RN) assesses air passenger's engagement with the airline service providers (ASP) on Twitter. This RN turns to social capital theory as a theoretical base to evaluate how the passengers engage with the ASP to depict their expectations on Twitter. The authors conducted two analyses. First, python was applied for tweet mining and sentiment analysis (SA) to identify the polarity in passenger's engagement with five ASP. This analysis depicted the positive sentiments of the passengers towards the ASP. Second, a qualitative analysis was carried to identify the themes that shape passenger's expectations before and after the outbreak of COVID-19 as they engage with the ASP on Twitter. This RN appears to be a pioneer in presenting a thematic model for the airline industry that compares air passenger's expectations on Twitter before and after the outbreak of COVID-19.

KEYWORDS:

• Air passenger expectations
• airlines industry
• covid-19
• sentiment analysis
• thematic analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anam Afaq

Anam Afaq is a Research Scholar and pursuing her Ph.D. in Marketing Management from Amity University Noida. Her area of interest in research includes Big Data Analytics and Digital Marketing. She is a certified Digital Marketer.

Loveleen Gaur

Loveleen Gaur (PhD) is a Professor of Management and Information Systems in Amity International Business School, at Amity University, Noida, India. She is serving in various editorial board of journals of repute. Her area of research is Artificial Intelligence and Digital Marketing, Business Intelligence and Data Mining.

Gurmeet Singh

Gurmeet Singh (PhD) is currently working as Professor and Head in School of Business & Management at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji. Prior to this, he was Associate Dean Research, Postgraduate Affairs, and Internationalisation for seven years in the Faculty of Business and Economics. Professor Singh has contributed more than 130 articles in leading international journals and international conferences, including more than 60 articles in ABDC and SJR ranked international journals. His current research interests include Marketing, Information Systems, Social Entrepreneurship, Small Businesses, business ethics, food consumption behavior, e-Governance, open innovation and service operations management.

Amandeep Dhir

Amandeep Dhir (DSc, PhD) is a Professor of Research Methods at University of Agder, Norway. He is also a visiting professor at Norwegian School of Hotel Management, University of Stavanger, Norway. His research appears in the Journal of Business Research, Technology Forecasting and Social Change, Internet Research, Business Strategy and Environment, Psychology & Marketing, Business and Industrial Marketing, Computers in Human Behaviour, Computers in Industry, International Journal of Hospitality Management, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Journal of Cleaner Production, Information Technology & People, Food quality and preferences, Appetite, Information Technology & People, Australasian Marketing Journal, Enterprise Information Systems among others.