Part three: Recommendation and Reflection
Recommendation
Overall, we would like to cooperate with Delta Air Lines, Endeavor Air, and Southwest Airlines. In fact, Endeavor AIR is operated by Delta Air Lines. Delta Airlines and Southwest Airlines appeared to be the better choices in this category. They are the airlines that we can confidently recommend to everyone because their service has been approved to be good by the data and the consistency of their service level. Data shows that Delta and Southwest have very similar scores across all the segments with a small margin of difference. Southwest has a better performance on customer complaints and incidents but Delta performs slightly better on on-time arrival. Additionally, considering their market shares and size of business, both Southwest and Delta deserve to be the nominees of “best all-around”.
​
From the aspect of customer experience, the airline that has the worst performance in each section will be tagged with a major deficit and not recommended. With that being said, we highly suggest avoiding airlines such as American Airlines, United Airlines, ENVOY AIR, and Allegiant Air. Of these four airlines, American Airlines and United Airlines should be avoided the most in terms of customer experience since they have been underperforming in more than one section for years. Last but not least, we also analyzed on-time performance of Delta Airlines and found out that on-time arrivals and departures are the two most important factors affecting customer satisfaction.
Reflection
In our journey as a consultant team, we learned substantial consulting foundations and techniques about Tableau and R. In the process, We learned how to combine, clean, shape, and plot different types of data. But there are some things that can be improved. In terms of the data, there might be other factors for the satisfactory scores since the coefficient on complaints is a negative sign in our regression analysis, meaning that it is likely to have omitted variable bias. We also hope to get the data about airlines’ fares and consumer purchasing power combining each airlines’ routes to provide a more comprehensive evaluation for our customer. By analyzing the price fluctuations of various airlines and combining the comparison results of the above visualization, we would be able to provide advice that helps the travel agency decide which airlines to cooperate with within different seasons and then increase profits. On the other hand, obtaining data about consumer purchasing power can help the travel agency have a more in-depth view of planning itineraries. Analyzing the customers’ age groups with consumer purchasing power and their preferred spending months could allow us to help our customers develop more complete business plans that satisfy the needs of travelers. In the long run, a good airline experience combining highly-fitting travel routes would help the travel agency improve their customers’ satisfaction and create more long-term loyal customers. Finally, as a consulting team, we also realize the importance of the role of the consulting team to customers. That is, a key task of a consultant team is to help customers focus on effective strategies for long-term development.