Airline environmental sustainability actions and CSR impact on customer behavior

Abstract

Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) are growing concerns among passengers and airlines. However, the communication of such actions by airline companies is underexplored. Accordingly, this study aims to analyze airlines' CSR and Environmental Sustainability Actions (ESA) communications' impact on customer loyalty, through a Relationship Marketing (RM) perspective. Following a text-mining approach, 6181 Facebook comments were collected. A word frequency matrix was created from the collected data and used as input for PLS-SEM to test raised hypotheses. Results suggest that communication based on ESA and CSR positively affects behavioral loyalty and commitment. RM moderated ESA's communication impact on customer loyalty but not on the relationship between CSR communication and loyalty. These findings suggest that communicating environmental efforts positively affects customer loyalty, providing airline managers with valuable insights that should be considered within communication strategies to enhance return and customer retention.