Özge Duman Karaboğa

When service meets operations

A major international airline launched a hospitality framework to make cabin service more personal. I studied what happens when it meets a real flight, with too few crew, tight timelines and passengers who have never heard of it.

  • 5 crew interviews
  • 5 diary studies
  • 6 passenger interviews
  • 8 weeks
  • March 2026
Empty aircraft cabin lit in orange and blue
"Designing a service for an environment you've never operated in means designing for the flight that doesn't exist."

What the research revealed

The framework asks for the right things. Passengers want exactly what it promises: warmth, small gestures, personal contact. Crew want to deliver it. What stands between intention and experience is infrastructure.

  • Two realities, one flight. Crew and passengers experience the same flight through entirely different frames. On one side, a negotiation. On the other, a promise.
  • An invisible decision system. Crew carry a consistent priority system no document describes. The meal is always protected. The smile is always protected. Everything else is negotiated in real time.
  • Gap felt, not seen. Passengers never ask why something is missing. They fill the gap with an interpretation, and that interpretation is almost always negative.
  • The survey ask exposes the tension. When the ask follows genuine contact, passengers respond. When it doesn’t, it feels like score extraction to both sides.
  • What passengers remember. A name at the gate. Two minutes with a child. Moments that cost nothing and leave everything.
  • More contact is not always better. Uninvited crew interaction, announcements, screen pop-ups and commercial content all interrupt.

How I ran it

  • Structured crew diaries. An 8-question diary completed after real flights. Each entry captured one moment of conflict between service expectations and operational conditions: what was planned, what happened, what the crew decided and how it felt.
  • Two-layer crew interviews. Five interviews of 45 to 55 minutes, from cabin crew to senior purser. General questions came first, then questions drilling into specific diary entries, so crew could explain decisions already documented.
  • Passenger interviews. Six interviews of 30 to 45 minutes with people who had flown the same airline within six months. Questions followed the arc of a flight and avoided leading questions about crew performance.

What could be different

  • Prepare the ground before the first impression. Clearer pre-boarding communication from ground staff can turn absence into context.
  • Say it before the trolley shows it. A brief announcement or real-time meal availability on the seat screen sets honest expectations.
  • Let passengers know when something unusual happens. A short seat-screen notification closes the interpretation gap without adding crew workload.
  • Give crew the space the framework requires. Review crew allocation where the gap is largest.

What went well

  • The diary structure captured micro-decisions that interviews alone would never have surfaced.
  • Using diary entries as a second layer of questions grounded abstract discussion in specific moments.
  • Without both sides of the flight there is no gap. The dual-participant structure created the core finding.
  • My operational background gave me access and candour. I bracketed my own assumptions throughout analysis.

What I’d do differently

  • Some crew were cautious about company repercussions, even with anonymity assurances. I’d address that earlier and more explicitly.
  • Passenger recruitment was slower than expected. A small incentive would likely have broadened the pool.
  • The journey map is a synthesis of reported experience, not real-time observation.
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