Impact of Covid-19 on passengers and airlines from passenger measurements: Managing customer satisfaction while putting the US Air Transportation System to sleep

Philippe Monmousseau (1) , Aude Marzuoli (1) , Eric Feron (2) , Daniel Delahaye (1)

1 ENAC - Ecole Nationale de l'Aviation Civile
2 KAUST - King Abdullah University of Science and Technology

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on the air transportation system worldwide. This paper aims at analyzing the effect of the travel restriction measures implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic from a passenger perspective on the US air transportation system. Four metrics based on data generated by passengers and airlines on social media are proposed to measure how the travel restriction measures impacted the relation between passengers and airlines in close to real-time. The proposed metrics indicate that each airline has reacted differently to the COVID-19 travel restriction measures from a passenger perspective, therefore they can be used by airlines and passengers to improve their decision making process. This report comes ahead of official data related to the same sequence of events, thereby showing the value of passenger-borne data in an industry where corporate priorities, institutional prudence, and passenger satisfaction come close together.

Mots clés: Air transportation system; Passenger-generated data; Passenger-centric metrics; COVID-19

Domaines: Sciences de l'ingénieur [physics]; Autre; Statistiques [stat]; Méthodologie [stat.ME]; Informatique [cs]; Réseaux sociaux et d'information [cs.SI]; Informatique [cs]; Systèmes et contrôle [cs.SY]; Statistiques [stat]; Machine Learning [stat.ML]

Philippe Monmousseau, Aude Marzuoli, Eric Feron, Daniel Delahaye. Impact of Covid-19 on passengers and airlines from passenger measurements: Managing customer satisfaction while putting the US Air Transportation System to sleep. Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 2020, 7, pp.100179. ⟨10.1016/j.trip.2020.100179⟩. ⟨hal-02935347⟩