Airline Social Media Recovery Satisfaction: Has COVID Changed Everything?

Abstract

This study deals with airlines’ handling of customer complaints pre- and post-Covid 19. Authors extracted airlines’ responses regarding redress, timeliness, apology, credibility, facilitation, and attentiveness and analyzed them pre- and post-pandemic. The results indicate the differential impacts of organizational responses on recovery satisfaction pre- and post-pandemic. Attentiveness (timeliness) had a significant role only pre- (post-) pandemic. Redress, credibility and facilitation remained crucial in both scenarios. Further, pre-pandemic results showed that the impact of organizational responses (credibility, timeliness, and facilitation) on recovery satisfaction was greater for failures associated with core rather than augmented elements of airline service. In the post-pandemic scenario, the impact of organizational responses on consumers’ recovery satisfaction was the same for both categories of service failures. Thus, post-pandemic, airlines may emphasize redress, credibility, timeliness, and facilitation responses in their social media posts for both service failure types.