Customer Retention in Airline Companies: Case of North Cyprus

This thesis empirically investigate the factors that affect customer retention in the airline industry in North Cyprus; the factors that will be investigated are service quality attribute, perceived safety, customer satisfaction, loyalty reward program, relationship commitment and customer loyalty. The study also investigates about four different groups of purpose of travel (business, education, vacation and family visit) on the empirical model. SPSS and PLS programs are conducted for analyzing the data with 331 students respondents from different nationalities. The results suggest that there is a positive relationship between customer retention and the related factors, however not all of these relation are significant. The results also show that the different purposes of travel have different influence on the variables regarding the positive and the significant relation between them, noting that some independent variables have a negative effect on the dependent variables. Keywords: Customer Retention, Customer Satisfaction, Service Quality Attributes, Airline Industry, North Cyprus