Validating and Confirming Crucial Service Quality Attributes to Airline Customers’ Recommendations: A Feature Selection Approach

Facing competitive market situations, customer recommendations are an essential tool to attract potential customers as well as to get free promotions. This study aims to measure the most important airline’s service quality attributes of customer recommendations toward full-service and low-cost carrier airlines from Indonesia. To measure the most important airline’s service quality attributes influencing customer recommendations, a feature selection approach was used. The performance of feature selection algorithms was evaluated using support vector machines (SVM). Findings revealed that airlines’ reputation, employee knowledge, and information system were the most important airline service quality attributes of customer recommendations toward full-service airlines. On the other hand, airlines’ reputation, employee knowledge, employee courteousness, on-time performance, safety security, error records, responsive employees, and information systems were for low-cost carrier airlines. This research provides paths to airlines managers on how to get free advertisements through customer recommendations.