Keyword

Asian aviation; FSC; National carrier; Structural Equation Model (SEM); Thai Airways; Thailand

Abstract

In 2017, global international tourist arrivals set a new record of 1.32 billion individuals. From this, Thailand moved into the 10th spot with 35.4 million visitors, and US$57.5 billion in tourism earnings, which represented 12% of Thailand’s GDP. Therefore, given the critical nature of tourism to Thailand’s economy and the national carrier’s role, the authors sought to investigate how customer relationship management (CRM), perceived risk (PR), perceived service quality, and passenger trust (PT) affected Thai Airways’ passenger satisfaction (PS).  The research tool developed for the survey consisted of a questionnaire which used a seven-level, Likert type agreement scale for 34 items in Part 2. The study also conducted both a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and a structural equation model (SEM) to analyze the sample of 565 Thai Airways’ passengers. A latent variable path analysis was performed using LISREL 9.1 software, with the models found to be consistent with empirical data. The causal factors in the model had both a positive and negative influence on Thai Airways passenger satisfaction (PS), which can be explained by 14% of the variance (R2). The four variables ranked in importance included customer relationship management (CRM), perceived risk (PR), passenger trust (PT), and perceived service quality (PSQ), which had a total value of 1.00, -0.35, 0.20 and 0.11, respectively.


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