Global airline alliances: Convenience or complaints?

Vantage point: Insights from cutting-edge research

Airline alliances — which help travellers fly seamlessly with different airlines during a single journey — often cause customer dissatisfaction due to variation in service received by a traveller during a single journey, says research by Siddharth Shekhar Singh of the Indian School of Business, Trichy Krishnan, Dean, School of Management, Bennett University, and Dipak C Jain, honorary president of Woosong University.

The researchers came up with four reasons that cause variations in service quality of different airlines in an alliance. First, being part of an alliance stretched airlines’ service capabilities. When new members joined, member airlines were forced to cater