VICTORIA UNIVERSITY Business Research Methods (BMO6630) Survey on Low Cost Carrier Flights S u b m i t t e d B y : A m M i l a n ( 4 5 4 5 8 2 8 ) D i l a r a A k s e s ( 4 5 4 5 8 2 5 ) N e h a B i s h n o i ( 4 5 4 5 8 2 6 )Questionnaire on Low Cost Carriers Dear Participant, First, we would like to thank you for supporting us in conducting this research in exploring your preferences for the low cost carrier over traditional airlines. At any phase of the survey, if you feel that the question is intrusive or you are hesitant to answer to any inquiry, you can withdraw from the questionnaire anytime. Further, we highly appreciate if you can provide us with the reasons of selecting a particular low cost carrier airline as your preference. Your answer is valuable to us as there are no standard answers to the questionnaire. The main objective of this research is to enhance your future experience by valuable ideas. This will take no longer than 20 minutes to finish. If you have any further queries about the research conducted, please do not hesitate to contact: Am Milan [email protected] Victoria University, Sydney DilaraAkses [email protected] Victoria University, Sydney Neha Bishnoi [email protected] Victoria University, Sydney Have you travelled with a Low Cost Carrier Airline within a year? Yes (Proceed to Section 1) No (Thanks for your valuable time and Close) Section 1: Demographic 1. Your Name (Optional): __________________________, ________________________________ (Last Name) (First Name) 2. Please tick the age group you belong to: 18 – 29 30 – 49 50 – 65 3. Please tick the gender you belong to: Male Female Other 4. Specify your occupation (Optional):_________________________________________________ 5. Please tick the Annual Income group you belong to: $ 40,000 - $ 59,999 $ 60,000 - $ 79,000 Above $ 80,000 Section 2: Travelling Experience (Please specify one) 6. Purpose of travelling: Business Vacations Other7. Favorite Low Cost Carrier Airline: Virgin Australia Qantas Jet Star Tiger Airways Any other (Please Specify)______________________ 8. Frequency of your travel with the airline you mentioned above: Always Often Rarely 9. Tick your experience with the airlines while making the bookings: Services Excellent Good Average Bad Poor Price and availability of Airline Ticket Time taken in Online Booking Baggage Allowance offered Availability of Customer Service Quality of offered Discounts Quality of Add-on services offered, such as, Flight + Hotel Customer friendly website 10. Rate your experience of travelling from the preferred airlines: Services 5 4 3 2 1 Time taken in Check-in Time taken in Baggage Check-in Professionalism and behavior of Ground Staff Behavior and friendliness of Airlines Crew Availability of Flight Attendant Quality of In-Flight Meals Punctuality of Airplanes11. How do you perceive prices offered by Low Cost Carriers Airlines? Excellent Good Average Poor 12. Would you like to get promotional update by the following? Mobile Mail E-mail None at all 13. Which country or places would you like to travel in the future? Country: ________________________________________________________________ 14. Are you happy with the quality of prepaid meals provided by LCC? Agree Disagree Not Decided 15. Would you like to get frequent flyers card? Yes No 16. Do you encounter bad experience on travelling with LCC? Poor service Ground/Flight attendant misbehavior Flight Delayed 17. On your future travel plan, would you consider to use LCC again or traditional flights? Yes, LCC is competitive and continue to patronize in my future flight No, traditional airlines will always be better than LCCs Not decided yet 18. Have you enjoyed your travel with your recent LCC flight? Yes, Definitely No, Never19. Would you like to recommend Low cost carriers to your family, friends and relatives? Strongly recommend Never recommend 20. What would you suggest to make service better and more prompt? Please give your candid opinion. ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ Your opinion is important to us. Thank you for your valuable time.Report The purpose of this report is to examine customer’s preference in air travel particularly on the low cost carrier airlines. The main objective of our research is to discover the particular reasons and inclinations that a customer holds while selecting between various LCCs flights. For this reason, it was important to maintain the quality of questionnaire as simple, easy to read, with clear instructions and understandable. Therefore, the survey consists of a range of questions including the open ended and closed ended questions. Each type question has its own range of cons and pros. For example, (Sincero, 2012) using a closed-ended type of question, it is easy to respond however, it is not very clear to analyze the meaning of such answers, as they give limited information about the issue. According to Sherri (2010), it is possible that closed ended questions will affect people’s answer. On the other hand, this type of survey questions is best for the quantitative type of surveys. In our questionnaire, there are two types of closed-ended questions; four & five Likert Scale ranging from Poor to Excellent and objective type questions with options provided along. The reason for selecting four and five Likert Scale is, smaller the interval is for a particular estimate, the more precise the estimate is. Another type of questions that have been used in our survey are yes, no type of questions, and drawback of these types of questions is that, there is no middle opinion that we can consider similar as Likert Scale type of questions. We have purposely included these questions to have some direct information from the people. In 2010 researchers found that, “when explicitly offered the economy as a response, more than half of respondents (58%) chose to not answer; only 35% of those who responded to the open-ended version volunteered the economy. Moreover, among those asked the closed-ended version, fewer than one-in-ten (8.5%) provided a response other than the five they were read; by contrast fully 43% of those asked the open-ended version provided a response not listed in the closed-ended version of the question.” The order of the questions in the questionnaire has been purposely designed in such a way, that it retains the interest of the participant. Therefore, we have asked simple questions first and progressively moved to the difficult ones. The maximum questions involve selecting an option from a given range, that makes participants feel comfortable in answering the questions, as they are not required to think more for the answers. This kind of survey is easy to fill and participants feel interested to answer the questions. Therefore, for a surveyor there is no need to compel people to fill their surveys. The demographical information of the customers is gathered in this survey poll to reflect opinions according to major categories such as, age, group, salary, etc. This result will support in understanding the nature of frequent flyers. The section two includes, two questions based on Likert Scale measuring the quality of experience during bookings and traveling. The different questions available in this question relates to web booking, data accessibility, nature of rebates offered under limited time plans, cost of air ticket, flight planning, customer satisfaction, baggage allowance and so on. All this results will contribute in building the brand image of LCC airlines. The next set of questions helps in measuring the experience of the customers during their travel with LCC airlines. The questions here relate to security, check-in experience, baggage check-in, feedback of the crew from ground to flight staff, etc. The other questions, in this section measure the quality of ordered food provided in flight. On the other hand, the choice of objective questions can be justified, as it requires the customer to give his opinion on various issues in short and precise manner. This survey includes questions that test the loyalty of the clients towards the company, as reliability is a critical element for the organizations to have aggressive advantage over competition. Likewise, there are inquiries that endeavor to gather the sentiment of clients on the cost offered by LCCs, the security worries that a client has while going in LCCs, the esteemed rivalry they provide for conventional carriers and whether the flights are worth to settle on long distance travel. These inquiries try to get a bull's eyed perspective of the clients' opinion on the administration quality offered, furthermore on different components such as cost of the flight, discount offers and customer satisfaction.In this section, we have used one research paper as a reference for the security questions (Snyder and Tai, 2014). It likewise asks for the changes that are dealt with a subjective question at the end. As a group, we all have done our part successfully and equally. We, as a group decided and assigned the work to each other, and because of that, Am and Neha, prepared the survey questions, and at the end, we all worked on report writing together. Neha and Am majorly did the designing part. We had some little basic problems, such as, finding a common time to work on our project; however, we were able to resolve this issue by organizing some meetings. Significant discussions were held, utilizing innovation that is, through Skype video conferencing, facebook talks, telephone calls. As it is very common in teamwork, sometimes we had difference of opinion, perceptions and preferences even to the designs, but we were able to convince each other with our logical answers. We believe, every part of this assignment is done with a lot of hard work and teamwork. We were able to succeed, as we used to work as a group in other subjects as well. The major problem was, one of our teammate had her wedding in between and because of that, we were not able to start our work soon. To resolve this issue, Neha and Am initiated the work, and assigned Dilara to some of the tasks and gives her the deadlines so she can arrange her schedule. To conclude, this survey helped us in understanding, how to do survey research, how we can write a survey report, also the most important one was dealing with problems while working in a team. In a good team, more people work together, more they learn and step away to become better workers in their own jobs.References Chou 2015, “An analysis of the relationship between service failure, service recovery and loyalty for Low Cost Carrier travelers”, Journal of Air Transport Management, Vol. 47, pp.119-125. Jackson, Sherri, 2010, “Research Methods: A Modular Approach”, Thomson Wadsworth, Accessed on 10 December 2010. Kim and Lee 2000, “A study on importance difference of airlines’ selective factors according to level (high-low) of involvement”, Journal of Tourism Sciences, Vol. 24, no. 2, pp.213-233. Sarah Mae Sincero, 2012, “Types of Survey Questions”, Retrieved Jan 22, 2016. Snyder, Tai, 2014, “Customer Satisfaction at Low Cost Airlines: A Case Study OfJetstar Pacific Airlines (JPA)”, The Clute Institute International Academic Conference, pp. 254-265. Venkatesh2013,“A study on changing consumer preference and satisfaction levels towards the Budget Airline, Tiger Airways and Air Asia; Competitive Prospective”, IPASJ International Journal of Management (IIJM), Vol. 1, December-2013. Wittman 2014, “Are low-cost carrier passengers less likely to complain about service quality?”, Journal of Air Transport Management, Vol. 35, pp.64-71.