Market Research Assessment of Airlines\'

Market Research

Assessment of Airlines' Market Research Project

In assessing the preferences of business leaders who frequently charter business jets to hold meetings and also get work done on their way to destinations, a private airline company initiates a research project to see if reconfiguring the interior of their jets to reduce the number of seats and install tables instead. The cabin reconfiguration will significantly cut back on the number of passengers each flight can hold yet potentially lead to greater profitability by appealing to business leaders who charter planes regularly. The intent of this paper is an assessment of the research process used to gain insights into whether the cabinet reconfiguration should be completed or not.

Assessment

What is immediately apparent is that the research design has not been carefully designed to capture the most critical members of the company's customer base, which are the business leaders. The research design needs to be first re-done to concentrate on redefining the sampling frame including the target audience and the required sample size to ensure the results deliver a high level of statistical validity and reliability of the research itself. Only after defining the sampling frame, sample size and hypothesis should the data collection be defined (Hague, 2002). Most troubling is the fact that there is no segmentation based on previous respondent behavior is included, and this is critical for any services-based business to understand and plan for in the context of market research projects (Harris & Uncles, 2007). Specifically looking at the most loyal business leaders who fly the airlines could lead to an entirely different research design, one that tests an even more fundamental hypothesis, which is why business leaders are choosing the private airline in the first place. The two major determinants of why business travelers choose one airline over another is cost vs. service (Huse, Evangelho 2007). What is needed is more concentration first on the objectives of the study in light of the planes' proposed reconfigurations' increasing full service relative to low cost. Once that hypothesis in conjunction with a pricing analysis of how much those loyal business leader travelers on the airline today are willing to pay, then a more accurate research design can be developed.