Quality and Reliability Engineering International

In this paper two different non‐classic methods, based on the analysis of qualitative data, are applied to evaluate customer satisfaction. The airline industry is considered with British Airways used as a case study. First, a classification algorithm based on the decision tree theory is performed. By conserving the original ordinal measuring scale for the items, it is possible to rank the dimensions in order to obtain a map of preference, select the groups of subjects more or less satisfied and delineate the peculiar characteristics of each group. Second, a probabilistic model, the Rasch model, is applied with the aim of distinguishing the two components (satisfaction and quality) that influenced the answer to each item and obtaining a numerical interval measure for both components. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.