Airline Satisfaction: What Makes a Good Flight?

Airplanes are one of the most common modes of transportation, and many have different opinions as to what makes a good flight. Some might focus on the snacks, others might love the leg room, and others might be satisfied by a simple low price. We sought to examine the root of what defines a satisfying or unsatisfying flight, using demographic data and traveler-submitted ratings on various aspects of the flight experience to find this root of satisfaction.

Taking a broad look at all the data, we had over 100,000 customers surveyed, which gave us a lot of stability in the data but also required us to sift through what was actually important to us. We decided to focus on the column titled, "satisfaction" as our overall comparison measure, seeing if we could identify the principal factor driving the travelers to respond in a certain way.

We will explore the connection between satisfaction and travel time, gender/age, and service ratings as well as our overall conclusions in the following sections.

Satisfaction by Travel Time

Our first broad category of variables relates to travel time, seeing if factors such as the duration of the flight and any arrival and departure delays connected to the flight affect customer satisfaction.

Visualization: Satisfaction by Flight Time

Visualization: Satisfaction by Arrival and Departure Delays

Conclusions/Insights: Satisfaction by Travel Time

In looking at this category, we first constructed a flight time boxplot. Interestingly longer flight distances tend to make customers more satisfied. This may be because airlines may tend to over focus their service and resources on longer flights. This chart may suggest to airlines that they should spend more on shorter flights given there is less satisfaction there. Perhaps, they could provide some quality features they do on longer flights on shorter flights such as a premium first class with a bed.

We also made a scatter plot highlighting the correlation between delays in minutes and satisfaction. As you can see, as the delays increase there is a greater percentage of neutral or dissatisfied customers. Sadly, given the amount of data we have it is difficult to tell the trends in the bottom left of the graph, but it looks like the majority of those in the bottom left are satisfied with their flight experience. Therefore, if airlines want to increase customer satisfaction they should work on the timeliness of their flights.

Satisfaction by Gender/Age

Our second broad category of variables relates to gender and age, seeing if the gender of the flyer or their age has a broad affect on customer satisfaction.

Visualization: Satisfaction by Gender

Visualization: Satisfaction by Age

Conclusions/Insights: Satisfaction by Gender/Age

These two visualizations reflect the impact of gender and age on overall satisfaction, starting with a pie chart. Here it can be seen that more males and females were dissatisfied than satisfied. Prior to looking at this graph it could have been told where airlines should focus their efforts on improving the flight experience, but there is a insignificant difference in each gender category. However, 1,500 more females were dissatisfied than males despite having an extremely similar satisfied number. Using this airlines might want to focus on improving the female traveling experience even though the difference is very small. Airlines might consider including little things such as makeup wipes in their care packages or rom coms in their in flight entertainment.

Moving to the histogram, interestingly the younger and older ages are generally very dissatisfied with their flight experience. Airlines already take this into account with allowing those with very young children and the elderly board early. However, they may want to take other precautions. They could incorporate more kids shows into in-flight entertainment and could maybe provide the elderly with newspapers and other things. They could also give the elderly free upgrades if seats are available to allow them more room as their bodies do not function as well.

Satisfaction by Service Ratings

Our last broad category of variables relates to ratings associated with the flight experience, seeing how much they affect customer satisfaction as a whole and which in particular might have the greatest impact.

Visualization: Satisfaction by Combined Rating Score

Visualization: Satisfaction by Time Convenient Rating

Conclusions/Insights: Satisfaction by Service Ratings

We utilized two visualizations to address the effect of service ratings on overall flyer satisfaction. When we look at this histogram, the total ratings of 10 performance measures rated from 1-5 are summed, giving each traveler a total rating score from 10-50. It is clear that the higher the total rating score, the higher percentage of travelers are satisfied with their trip, which makes sense. For travelers who had a total rating score less than 30, the overwhelming majority were neutral or dissatisfied, and even for travelers with a score of 30-35, there was still a solid majority. Only when travelers started to rate above 35 did the majority shift to more satisfied travelers. The overwhelming majority of travelers rated their flight between 25-45, indicating that very few trips were really perfect - this indicates that performing at a high level across all 10 categories is very difficult for airline companies.

Our second visualization, the funnel graph, breaks out one specific rating category, time convenience. This shows that most customers do rate their travel experience to be time convenient with the more customers rating their time convenience from ratings 4 - 5 rather than 1 - 2. Given more customers were dissatisfied than satisfied with their travel experience this seems to be odd. This may lead one to think that time factors are not a major role in passenger satisfaction, leading us to consider examining the impact of other service ratings and see if any tie more strongly to passenger satisfaction than time convenience does.

Overall Conclusions

It is clear that airline satisfaction isn't explicitly defined by one broad group of ratings. While it is impossible to conclude whether a traveler will be satisfied purely off of one rating, there are a few broad trends that we found present throughout our visuals that give a little bit better idea as to the satisfaction of a traveler. Longer flight times, flights with less delays, men, middle-aged travelers, and those with a higher total rating score were generally a little more likely to be satisfied with their flights. With the vast quantity of data, there is a lot of potential for further study and expansion on the ideas we presented, and this might allow us to more accurately pinpoint what defines flight satisfaction more fully in a future study.