Studying the Influence of Airlines Corporate Social Responsibility on Consumers Loyalty

Nowadays, integrating corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives into business is an important challenge facing organizations development. Corporations that embrace this concept reap many benefits including customer loyalty, positive attitudes toward brands, customer trust, positive publicity and better financial performance.Increased spending on CSR initiatives is expected to increase customer satisfaction and build competitive advantage. In today’s competitive airline business environment, companies are striking to retain their existing customers and gain the repurchase intention of customers. As a result, an increasing number of airlines have implemented CSR initiatives. CSR programs become active channels for building customer loyalty as customers appear to provide greater support for companies that are socially and environmentally responsible. Accordingly, Customer loyalty becomes one of the most essential consumers behaviors that airlines endeavor to influence through the use of corporate social responsibility as a marketing tool in their strategies.Therefore, this paper aims at exploring the relationship between corporate social responsibility and customer loyalty in the airline industry. It also tries to discover the main critical factors that have more effect on social responsibility in the airline industry. To achieve the purposes of this paper, a model was developed to measure the influence of airlines corporate social responsibility activities in customer loyalty andairline image. This model includes 16 attributes, which have been selected to cover airlines CRS activities, and 21 initial items for measuring customer loyalty. The proposed model was presented as a self administrated questionnaire. The sample chosen in this study includes mainly international airlines passengers (727 passengers). Furthermore, the analysis of simple linear regression and spearman correlation are applied. The results of this study confirm that there is a significance statistical relationship between airlines CRS activities and customer loyalty. The results also determine that social responsibility activities related to customers and community are the most important factors affecting customer perception of the airline image.