ABSTRACT
Although travel restrictions imposed by countries are gradually lifted, the airline industry rebounds only when customers’confidence in air travel is restored. Airlines that generate positive customer recommendations during the pandemic can have a competitive advantage in the post-pandemic environment. This article focuses on the prediction of customer recommendations of airlines during the pandemic. The results show that airline ratings established before the pandemic have weak performance, implying that customer recommendations could be based on other factors that are unique to the pandemic. In addition, COVID-19 travel safety of airlines and sentiments hidden in customer reviews are valuable for predicting customer recommendations. The results also confirm that flight duration affects the predictive powers of airline rating established before the pandemic and COVID-19 travel safety rating of airlines. There are important implications for the airline industry. First, airline ratings established before pandemic is not valuable to predict customer recommendations during COVID-19, underpinning the importance of including COVID-19 travel safety measures as part of the airline evaluation criteria in the future. Besides, COVID-19 travel safety is more relevant to customer recommendations in the long-haul markets. When selecting airlines for evaluation, airline rating organizations can give priorities to airlines that offer long-haul flights. IEEE