Effects of airline service quality on airline image and passengers loyalty: Findings from Arik Air Nigeria passengers

This paper investigates how individual service quality attributes under specified dimension rendered by Arik Airline determine the image of the airline and passengers’ loyalty to the airline. To achieve this, a well-structured questionnaire was designed in line with SERVQUAL dimension scale to capture the airline opinion of the passengers about the service rendered to them, their opinion on whether the quality of service has any effect on the image of the airline and finally if the nature of the airline image has any effect on repeat  patronage. A total of 600 questionnaires were distributed to a randomly selected sample out of the average weekly passenger volume of 2465 passengers that utilize the Arik air carrier. Data collected were analyzed first using Factor analysis in order to factor out the three major service quality dimensions and Pearson correlation coefficient was determined to ascertain the significant relationship between the factored service quality dimensions and the airline image. Finally, a relationship was further determined between the airline image and the passengers’ loyalty to the airline. Result from the analysis proved that there existed a strong statistically significant relationship between the service quality variables and the airline image, indicating that the quality of the service the airline offers has a positive relationship with the airline image and the airline image also has a positive relationship with the passengers repeat patronage. The study thus recommended that airline managers should improve on the quality of service rendered to passengers since it is one of the determinants of the airline image and the airline image also determines the passengers’ choice of repeat patronage.   Key words: Loyalty, SERVQUAL, modelling, image dimension, patronage