Service Quality and Rail Transport in Pakistan: A Passenger Perspective

Customer satisfaction and retention is one of the key determinants to measure the quality of products or services and hence the organizational performance. Due to the growing importance of quality in our life, customers desire to enjoy a relatively better quality of products or availing superior quality services has been increased. Pakistan is the sixth highly populated country of the world and its rapid population growth also contributes to an increase of people’s traveling demands. In Pakistan, train is the cheapest and comfortable mode of traveling especially for long distances. This paper aims to investigate the passengers’ perceptions about the service quality of rail transport system in Pakistan while traveling between the major cities especially from Lahore to Karachi, Multan, Peshawar and Rawalpindi. A modified SERVQUAL instrument including eight service quality constructs: empathy, assurance, tangibles, timeliness, responsiveness, information system, food and safety and security were employed to measure the passengers” perceptions about the service quality of railways. Out of 700 respondents, only 493 were selected and these respondents were frequent railway traveler on these routes. Results indicate that passengers perceive that quality of services delivered to them is not satisfactory.