Service Marketing Triangle of Airline Industry

Services marketing can be explained with the help of the Service Industry Triangle. There are three entities in the whole transaction process.

CUSTOMERS

Customers refer to the persons who have certain needs, wants and desires. The company makes promises to its customers. In the Airline industry, the customers refer to those persons who feel the need of travelling from one destination to another. The customers are further classified as Individual and Institutional. Institutional customers are those corporates who need their employees and executives to fly very often. Hence they have block bookings (reserved bookings) with the airliners.

COMPANY

The company is the dreamer and the offeror. The company dreams up an idea of service offering which will satisfy the customers’ expectation. The company is established with the basic objective of providing the specific transport service. Thus the airline industry with players like Indian airlines, jet airways, Sahara airways etc came into being.

PROVIDERS

These are finally the persons (staff) who interact with the customer. They are the ones who carry out the final transaction. This interface of the customer with the company is through the customer’s interaction with the employees of the company. In order to keep its promises, the company enables its employees to through setting up facilities to deliver the promises that is by setting up ticket and enquiry counters. Hence the company aims at offering its providers with the required infrastructure and training to optimize the quality of the transaction. For eg: Yearly employee training programs and performance appraisals done by Sahara airlines.

The strategic points where the provider and the customer interact are:

• § Enquiry of the services, flight timings, routes etc.;
• § Purchasing tickets, either from the airlines or from the travel agencies;
• § Checking in;
• § During boarding;
• § On board crew;
• § During disembarkation.

In a triangle, all three sides are essential to complete the whole. For services all three marketing activities represented by the sides of the triangle are critical to success; without one of the sides in place, the triangle or the total marketing effort cannot be optimally supported.