The ups and downs of air travel

Put 300 plus people in a really small space for a number of hours; expect many of them to sleep upright; feed them en masse (or not at all if it's budget); subject them to each other's snores, coughs, laughter, slurps and worse – and you're going to have a hard time keeping everyone happy. Sounds quite tough when you put it like that.

Indeed, airlines face a considerable customer service challenge...keeping us all happy in the skies. Some of them rise to the challenge and some fail. Sometimes the difference can be a smile, sometimes it needs a lot more than that to create loyalty. Airlines with strong brands are invariably forgiven more, but do passengers even care about branding when all they want to do is get from A to B?

Synovate spoke with more than 10,000 respondents in 13 markets across the world to find all about whether air travel was pleasure or pain, the impact of fuel costs and surcharges, easy-on-the-eye flight attendants, the frustrations of sitting near other people's children (without underestimating the frustrations of sitting near your own children) and chatty fellow passengers.

What became fairly clear, fairly quickly, was that for most people travel is all about getting from A to B, and the pleasure to pain ratio is determined by your seat.

Transactional travel or sky-high service?

Synovate quizzed people who had travelled by air about the one thing they best liked about being on a plane. For the majority, it's all about getting from point A to point B, with 56% choosing 'It's fast and it gets me where I need to be quickly' as the thing they most like about air travel.

The highest score for this attribute was from people in the United States (US), with 84% agreeing. Of course this may also be because air travel in the US is not always packed with comfort anyway...

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The seat of power

Much of what the survey highlighted was that the seat of all power for airlines is, well, the seat. Here's a little of what we found:

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Up in the air about intimacy

Very much related to the seat issue is who you sit next to... Who hasn't fearfully glanced up the aisle waiting to see who will be your new neighbour for the next several hours of your life?

Scott Lee, Executive Director of Synovate in Hong Kong, said the crux of the issue here for most people is the forced intimacy.

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Children shouldn't be seen, or heard

You know the scene... a harried mother tries to shut one child up, while the other child happily kicks the seat in front. Sit near this and tensions are running high before you've even seen the safety demonstration.

It turns out not everyone hates it. In good news for paranoid parents, two thirds of our air traveller respondents disagreed with the statement 'I get frustrated when sitting next to or near children'. But travellers in some markets are quite intolerant... who hates it most?

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Air travel to nose dive?

But will people even get on planes in the current economic environment? Across the markets surveyed, Synovate asked air travellers to choose one answer that best summed up the effect of fuel surcharges and increased costs of air travel for their situation. The study was conducted in July and, in cautiously good news for airlines, the highest overall answer was 39% who said 'I would consider looking for airlines offering cheaper flights'. This was the highest in Brazil at 62%, followed by Canada and the United Kingdom (UK) at 48%.

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How can an airline fly high?

Pleasing people is tough. Pleasing people at 30,000 feet is even tougher. So how does an airline stand out?

Scott Lee says brand positioning is critical to loyalty, but the basics have to be in place first.

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About the Synovate global air travel survey

This In:fact survey looked at air travel and covered more than 10,000 respondents in 13 markets around the world – Brazil, Canada, Egypt, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Taiwan, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States of America (USA). Of the 13,000 surveyed, 6,900 said they had travelled by air and these people answered the majority of the questions. The study was conducted in July 2008 using online, telephone and face-to-face methodologies.