SKYHACK

PROBLEM STATEMENT

As United Airlines is on its journey to becoming the largest airline in the world, our focus continues to be on what our customers think of our products and service and ensuring they are taken care of in the friendly skies. As an analyst, you are required to leverage data to help in identifying opportunity areas in United’s current Food &Beverage(F&B) service and make recommendations which can help in increasing F&B (Food &Beverage) service satisfaction rate by identifying pain points for our customers and challenges in our current inventory planning.

Participants are expected to perform a Descriptive analysis to understand patterns in our data and identify key drivers of overall customer satisfaction and make recommendations based on their analysis.

BACKGROUND

Various studies suggest that airline F&B service has a significant impact on customer experience and loyalty generation. F&B is also one of the key concerns of unhappy customers as captured in their feedback forms. We have spent the last few years focusing on improving F&B service by partnering with global & regional vendors, encouraging customers to prebook their meals wherever applicable and improving forecasts for inventory. However, with constant network expansion plans and evolving demand, this continues to be an area of focus. Customers who pre-order their meals have a better satisfaction rate compared to those who do not. However, a small fraction of travelers prebook meals at this point.

Meal options can vary by market and haul type (Haul type is defined based on how long the flight is based on duration/miles). Some short haul markets (specially <500 miles) would not offer any meal-service which can be of concern specially for customers with multiple connections.

United uses a hub-and-spoke model to connect passengers between different cities. In a hub-and-spoke model, there is a central airport, called the hub, that serves as a connecting point for flights to and from other airports, called spokes. This helps in consolidating traffic from multiple spokes into the hub, and then flying larger aircraft on the hub-to-hub routes and can lead to lower operating costs for airlines. However, from the perspective of Inflight service, hub-spoke model can result in better customer experience on hub flights compared to spoke flights.

How is F&B Satisfaction Calculated?

United measures F&B satisfaction using our NPS (Net Promoter Score) survey. Customers are asked - How satisfied were you with the food & beverage served on your flight from [CITY] to [CITY]? Customers can score between 0-5 and can also provide additional feedback under - Is there anything else you would like to share about the food & beverage served on your flight from [CITY] to [CITY]?

% Inflight Satisfaction = Satisfied Sample/Total Sample*100

Satisfied Sample = Score is either 4 or 5 (Score ranges from 0-5)

DELIVERABLES

• Perform root cause analysis to identify key drivers of F&B satisfaction score during summer months
• Use survey comments to understand major themes related to F&B that customers are complaining about
• Showcase your coding skills, write queries in SQL/Python/R to summarize data at different levels and draw meaningful conclusions
• Tell a story from the data and share some initial recommendations. What further deep dives would you like to do to gain better understanding of underlying issues?
• Create a presentation with your key findings and recommendations (4-5 slides covering your understanding of the problem)

Please be thorough in your response.  We are interested in the process used to arrive at your answer, as well as any assumptions made as you answer the questions.  Feel free to ask clarifying questions or request additional information on discussion forums.

Data description

• Survey data – Inflight Satisfaction Score
• Survey data – Customer comments/feedback
• Inflight Service – Pre order data
• Inflight Service – Inventory data (only for Business/First Class)

Table 1 - Inflight Satisfaction Score

Table 2 - Customer comments/feedback

Table 3 - Inflight Service: Inventory data (only for Business/First Class - J)

Table 4 - Inflight Service: Pre order data (for All Cabins – J/Y)

DATASETS