مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

In response to the rapidly increasing tourism demand and to attract backpacking tourists, many airline companies have built a new strategy using low-cost airlines to increase their market share (Francis et al., 2004) and improve the service quality to fit tourist’s expectations (Nagar, 2013; Wittman, 2014). The critical attributes for low-cost airlines to create a market competitive advantage are not only dependent on operating effectively but also on market reputation and marketing strategy (Akamavi et al., 2015). By developing tourists’ loyalty, low-cost airlines can significantly improve service reliability, service quality, and brand reputation to enhance trust and satisfaction (Akamavi et al., 2015; O’Connell and Williams, 2005). To manage these complexities and the competitive global environment, airlines have developed and perfected dynamic capacities to adjust their strategies in response to dynamic environments and changing demand in new generations (Bilotkach et al., 2015; Morandi et al., 2015). Thus, there is a growing need to examine the extent to which service dimensions (e.g., service quality) are actually associated with an understanding of tourists’ behaviors and feelings, and why these dimensions might also increase in that regard (Hutchinson et al., 2009).

Recently, some tourism and hospitality scholars have argued that service quality can positively or negatively impact a tourist’s consequential consumption behavior (Ye et al., 2014). For example, Ye et al. (2014) found that individual perceptions of service or products provide a good opportunity for researchers to investigate the relationship between the value evaluation of a product or service, recommendations and satisfaction. It would seem that airlines’ service value and corporate image being consistent with passengers’ needs and expectations may influence their behavioral intentions, such as their willingness to recommend to others or repurchase (Park et al., 2004). To deliver better service to passengers, airlines need to understand the context of passengers’ service demands and expectations (Aksoy et al., 2003). This is highly challenging for low-cost airlines because service quality is significantly connected with tourists’ behavioral intentions, such as satisfaction and feedback (Saha and Theingi. 2009). However, few scholars have investigated whether and how service quality can influence tourists’ expectations from a low-cost airline and the consequential behaviors, such as wordof-mouth recommendation, corporate reputation and purchase * Corresponding author. intention, of individual tourists.

The majority of past research has been focused on creating a conceptual model for service quality (Parasuraman et al., 1985) or has focused on identifying critical attributes for SERVQUAL dimensions (Carman, 1990; Parasuraman et al., 1991). However, researchers have indicated that service quality may be the key influence of perception, feeling, and the formation of consumers’ purchase intentions (e.g., Taylor and Baker, 1994). These perceptions and feelings, in turn, influence the evaluation of service providers’ reputations and the customer’s word-of-mouth recommendations about the service providers. As such, corporate reputation or WOM may constitute a key mediating mechanism between service quality and consumer behavior. This study develops and empirically examines an integrated model that uniquely depicts low-cost airline tourists’ expectation as a central mechanism through which service quality is related to important marketing strategy. This model looks at word-of-mouth recommendations and corporate reputation as various outcomes of service quality which simultaneously promote tourists’ purchase intentions. In addition, this study identifies a potentially important attribute that reflects customers’ affective characteristic, empathy, and explores its role in the service process and experience. Defined as a customer’s “specific expectations/requests regarding service needs with the performance after use of that service” (Dedeoglu and Demirer, 2015: 132), empathy is predicted to increase purchase intention by helping a customer to detect, experience, feel, understand, and regulate pleasant interactions stemming from service quality.