The effect of wearing a COVID 19 mask on the perceived service quality

The COVID-19 pandemic, which emerged in China at the end of 2019 and spread all over the world and continues to be effective until today, has deeply shaken the aviation industry in particular. Aviation authorities have ensured that airlines take a number of measures for both passengers and staff to prevent the spread of the virus. Within the scope of these measures; it is aimed to determine how passengers perceive the services offered by the airline before boarding the aircraft and to determine the weak points of the related services. During the COVID-19 pandemic, of passengers traveling domestically with national airlines; by measuring their perceptions of pre-flight service quality dimensions, they have been compared with three similar studies conducted before the COVID-19 pandemic. The research was conducted with 356 domestic passengers selected by convenience sampling method, who traveled domestically from Gazipaşa-Alanya Airport with national airlines between 08 July 2021 and 27 July 2021 and agreed to participate in the research. In the study, the 5-dimensional SERVQUAL scale developed by Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry in 1985 was used. Only the perceptions part of the SERVQUAL scale has been applied, since the passengers avoided doing the survey due to COVID-19. To the data obtained as a result of the research; frequency test, independent t-test analysis, one-way ANOVA analysis and one-sample t-test were applied. With these analyses, it was found that there was no significant difference between the perception for five dimensions of service quality with the gender, age, marital status, income levels and the airline travelled. It has been detected that there is a significant difference between with the level of education and in the dimensions of "reliability" and "assurance", the occupational group and the dimensions of "reliability" and "responsiveness". It was found that the perceptions of the "reliability" and "assurance" dimensions of those with a university education level are higher than those with a master's/doctorate degree and the unemployed have higher perceptions of "reliability" and "responsiveness" than housewives. It was concluded that the measures implemented during the COVID-19 epidemic did not increase the perceived service quality of air passengers. In this pandemic period, national airlines in Turkey need to pay more attention to the reliability dimension in order to achieve the required service quality and strengthen their corporate image. Since there is very little research in the literature about the aviation industry in the COVID-19 pandemic, this research is important in terms of filling the gaps in the literature and shedding light on future research.