Investigation of customers’ loyalty behaviour in the airline industry in Tanzania

The purpose of this study was to investigate customer loyalty behaviour in the airline industry in Tanzania. It assessed the extent to which service quality; service recovery; price and customer satisfaction influence customer loyalty in airlines that operate in Tanzania. The cases used for the study were three airlines which are; Air Tanzania, Precision air, and Fast jet. The study was conducted in Dar es salaam, in particular at JNIA because of being the major airport in the country with large annual passenger statistics of about 2 million as of 2013 statistics. The methodology involved a cross sectional survey whereby, 125 passengers responded to self administered questionnaires and three airlines marketing managers were also interviewed. The Chi- Square, Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Mann-Whitney tests were used to test the hypotheses. Findings from the study indicate that, there is a significant association between service quality and passenger satisfaction, and the relationship between service quality and customer loyalty is mediated by customer satisfaction. Further, it was found that, good airlines recovery strategies increase not only the level of satisfaction but also likelihood of passengers to remain loyal. Pricing strategies have been found to have a significant association to loyalty, in particular fare affordability and fare payment flexibility were found significant in influencing loyalty. With regard to the findings of this study, further studies are advised on each of the asserted loyalty influencing variables (price, service quality, and service recovery and customer satisfaction) and conducting of longitudinal studies because customers’ preferences and loyalty change with time. Also, other studies can include international airlines since studying domestic operating airlines alone limits the generalization of the findings.