ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the concept of service quality and the past two decades of research on the topic to help understand the relationship between the research and its findings, the future of airline service quality, and the approaches that management might take to address these issues. Airlines are exploring new classes of service that will offer passengers amenity and space options for a price. Prior research will divide recent research into popular press reports and academic studies. The academic research is not an exhaustive list of the topic. If the volume of research is an indication of the importance of a topic, then airline service quality is certainly important to academic researchers. It is also a complex, bedeviling construct to researchers, consumers and airlines. Airline service quality lies somewhere in the middle, subject to the winds of changing expectations, economic crisis and airline competition.
