Yasintha Soelasih, Sumani,
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of transportation has decreased, especially air transportation. Airline companies need to implement appropriate strategies so that they can maintain their sustainability. Strategies can be designed based on consumer desires. At this time, consumers need an assurance that air transportation is safe against the transmission of the virus. The purpose of this study is to see the appropriate strategy in maintaining consumers by looking at experiential marketing, customer loyalty, repurchase intention, and word-of-mouth variables. The study was conducted to domestic flights in Indonesia. Sampling was done by purposive sampling and distributing questionnaires using Google Form via Instagram, Facebook, LINE, and WhatsApp. The number of samples was 779 respondents. The testing of instruments and variables was carried out by testing the validity and reliability by employing composite reliability (CR), average variance extracted (AVE), and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The hypothesis was tested using structural equation modeling with lisrel 8.8. The results showed that there was no direct influence between experiential marketing and word-of-mouth. Whereas, the partial test showed that there were direct effects of experiential marketing on customer loyalty, experiential marketing on repurchase intention, customer loyalty on repurchase intention, customer loyalty on word-of-mouth, and repurchase intention on word-of-mouth. The results of simultaneous test showed an impact of experiential marketing on word-of-mouth through customer loyalty and repurchase intention, with a total effect value of 0.86, in meaning that a mediation variable was needed to create word-of-mouth from experiential marketing.