E-quality of Airline Companies' Websites and Emotional Brand Effects

Consumers depend on brands more in the online environment than offline, due to the anonymity of the Internet. Companies with well-known brands benefit from the halo effect when they try to establish themselves in the online environment since consumers are more receptive to online offers of familiar brands that they trust than to offers of unknown brands. The literature shows us the importance of emotional value, and its influence exercised on a brand as the detonator of satisfaction, trust and loyalty behaviours towards it (Moliner et al, 2007; Sanchez et al, 2007). In the civil aviation sector, the airline companies have used their brands to create their websites and thus attract passengers to make their purchases through their websites. In this context, the aim of the study has been to analyse the quality of airline companies' websites and their possible relationship with the consumer's feeling of affect towards a brand. For this purpose we carried out an empirical study consisting of a total of 1710 personal interviews with users of the airline companies Iberia, British Airways, and easyJet who buy their tickets through the airline companies' own websites. In the analysis of the data, first a study of the dimensionality, reliability and validity of the equality and emotional value scales was carried out by means of a Confirmatory Factor Analysis using the Structural Equations Models Technique. Next a descriptive analysis was carried out applying the ANOVA technique, allowing identification of any significant differences between the means of several independent samples. The results reveal that significant differences do exist in the items forming the e-quality scale among users of the three airline companies, and these differences arise from relationships closely linked to the feeling aroused by the brand in each of the three samples.