یک مطالعه در مورد تاثیر تاخیر خدمات مسافرت هوایی در واکنش های عاطفی و رفتار مشتری   A study on the impact of airline service delays on emotional reactions and customer behavior

1. Introduction Service delays are very common experiences for customers. Today, many people consider these delays to be a waste of time, and no customers enjoy waiting for long periods due to delays (Casado Diaz and Mas Ruíz, 2002
). If customers perceive their waiting time as long due to a service delay, they will deem the quality of service to be low, leading the customer dissatisfaction and negative behavioral intentions (Taylor, 1994; Tom and Lucey, 1995; Van Vaerenbergh et al., 2014). Therefore, service delays negatively affect service quality perceptions as well as satisfaction levels and behavioral intentions. Accordingly, many service-based companies endeavor to decrease service delays (Bielen and Demoulin, 2007). Service delays are also common in the airline industry. Airline services cannot be reserved; they are provided on a real-time basis. As such, a variety of problems can lead to service delays, and customers have grown used to waiting for the required services to become available (Sarel and Marmorstein, 1998). However, despite being commonplace in the airline industry, these delays negatively affect the emotional responses and behavioral intentions of customers. It is important for companies within the airline industry to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, and hence, it is essential to understand the impact that service delays have on passengers. Although many preceding studies have been conducted in traditional service areas, most have focused on how service delays have affected customer satisfaction and loyalty (Anderson, 1994; Fornell et al., 1996; Hui and Tse, 1996; Pruyn and Smidts, 1998; Mittal and Kamakura, 2001). Some studies on service failures and service delays have been performed in airline industry areas, but these studies have mainly focused on diversified factors e e.g. stability, controllability, and customer inoculation e related to service failures (Folkes et al., 1987; Mikolon et al., 2015; Van Vaerenbergh et al., 2014). Emotional reactions to service failures have not been adequately studied. In general, there has been a tendency to conduct studies under the assumption that a variety of factors representing emotional responses can be represented as a single factor (Price et al., 1995; Taylor and Claxton, 1994; Casado Diaz and Mas Ruíz, 2002
). Emotional responses to service failures can be categorized as anger and uncertainty (i.e. simple dissatisfaction), but affirmative responses are also possible and should be included to garner a more balanced understanding (Weiner, 2000; Casado Diaz and Mas Ruíz, 2002
). However, the role and the impact of acceptability, which is the positive emotional reaction, has been ignored in the preceding studies, and such positive emotional reaction is attracting the special attention from the studies related to the service failure. Nevertheless, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, no studies have yet been performed on the effects of service delays and affirmative responses on the behavioral intentions of passengers with a focus on service delays as waiting time. The purpose of this study is to analyze what impact the service delay has on the airline passengers’ behavioral intentions through the positive and negative emotional reaction. More specifically, the affirmative purpose of this study is to analyze the impact of service delays on the anger, uncertainty, acceptability, repurchase intentions, and negative word-of-mouth. The important contribution of this study is to suggest the model to understand the impact of service delay in the airline industry by including the acceptability, which is the positive emotional reaction ignored in the preceding studies, well. In addition, another contribution of this study compared to preceding studies is to highlight the importance of positive emotional reaction by the service delay as a measure to draw the positive behavioral intentions from the passengers.