Airline Business Models and Service Quality in the European Airline Industry

This paper aims at extending knowledge of the link between airline business models and service quality. It specifically asks whether low cost carriers (LCCs) are more punctual than traditional network carriers (TNCs). Previous research has not answered this question for the European case so far. Therefore, this paper complements existing research and adds transparency and accuracy to simple on-time performance (OTP) rankings that are available on the internet. It builds on empirical evidence from more than one million intra-European flights, including flights from 8 European TNCs and 5 European LCCs. Our statistical analyses indicate that LCCs are more punctual than TNCs. At the same time, we have to expect that the overall OTP advantage of LCCs is the result of a heterogeneous set of individual airlines’ performances. Thus, generalizing our findings to other airlines is problematic.