Predicting Skytrax’s Official World Airline Star ratings from customer reviews

Abstract

Skytrax audits and ranks airlines internationally in its yearly ‘Official World Airline Star Ranking’. Unfortunately, its activity is severely restricted, at most covering just 30% of those airlines listed as open for review by passengers in its website in 2010. This research article explored the possibility of using a readily available variable as predictor, as an alternative way of ranking the remaining 70% of airlines in a simpler and more straightforward manner. The regression formula retained correlated highly with the criterion variable, accounting for 47% of its variance, thus supporting the viability of using customer reviews as a possible way of predicting ranking scores for airlines not officially audited by Skytrax.