CASE STUDY

Monarch Airlines was formed in 1967 and began commercial operations on 5 April 1968 with a charter flight from to using a second hand Bristol 175 Britannia 300 turbo- prop plane. Based at Luton and flying from half a dozen UK airports, it now operates scheduled flights to over 50 destinations, mainly around the Mediterranean. Monarch also flies long haul to Orlando, Tobago and Goa and medium haul to the Canaries, and The Gambia.

In 1972, the airline carried 500,000 pas- they perform on the ground and in the air. experience of dealing with that particular sengers in one year for the first time, a million Monarch currently obtains 80,000 reviews airline. One thing people are very happy to in 1981 and two million in 1988. In 2008 the and maintain a 92% satisfaction rating. talk about is a good or bad experience with airline reversed its emphasis on charter flights an airline! and 80% of its flights are now scheduled. In Whilst Monarch have an extremely clear 2013 it carried over six million passengers per picture of what customers think of them, The satisfaction scores for competitor annum and had 3,300 employees employed they were unsure as to how non-customers airlines allowed Monarch to overlay this across the airline, tour operator and engineer- perceive competitor airlines. Therefore the data onto their own, producing ‘Customer ing divisions. Monarch were also a finalist for research objective was to understand how Journey Maps’ for different airlines, and see the 2014 TTG awards ‘Airline of the year’. satisfied non-customers are with compet- exactly where competitors under and over ing airlines across the same 26 customer perform compared with Monarch. Ask a group of people who have taken a requirements measured in the Monarch flight in the last 3 months to tell you about customer satisfaction surveys. The final report and analysis was pro- their experience and you’ll no doubt get a duced quickly – within 3 weeks of initial real mixed bag of responses, from excep- Utilising the TLF Panel, we sourced a rep- project discussions. It provided Monarch tional to truly dreadful and everything in resentative sample of 1000 UK adults who with some vital insight into how they between. had taken a flight in the last 12 months, and perform and are perceived by customers asked them to rate their last experience. compared with competitors. So how do individual airlines compare? After asking which airline they flew with What things do some airlines do very well, and when, respondents were asked to score and others do really badly, and why? This their satisfaction with the airline across all was something were keen 26 criteria. to understand. Monarch Airlines have their own Customer Satisfaction Survey, asking From the sample, some airlines obvi- customers to rate their satisfaction on a ously featured more prominently than 10-point numerical scale for 26 individual others. BA, easyJet, , Thomas Cook, criteria. They ask customers about every- Thomson and Virgin all obtaining larger thing from searching for flights through to sample sizes. Other less popular airlines post-flight customer service follow-up. obtained smaller sample sizes. A number Darren Wake of respondents also cited Monarch as the Monarch also use Feefo to ask custom- airline they most recently flew with. Business Development Manager ers to rate their experience. This is a two TLF Research stage process and customers can rate their In addition to obtaining numerical sat- booking experience and their flight experi- isfaction scores, respondents also provided 01484 467012 ence so Monarch get a clear picture of how detailed text comments to describe their [email protected]

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