When Green Choices Encounter Service Failures: Barriers to Air Passengers’ Low-Carbon Participation and Service Recovery

Green flight service uses incentive mechanisms to encourage passengers to participate in low-carbon value co-creation. However, willingness to make green choices does not necessarily translate into smooth participation, as service failures during implementation may create barriers to passenger participation. Drawing on Service System Theory, this study conceptualizes green flight as a service system involving passengers, airlines, service rules, and incentive mechanisms. Using 1161 passenger complaints collected from the Service Quality Supervision Platform of the Civil Aviation Administration of China between January 2021 and June 2025, Word2Vec-based semantic expansion and the Structural Topic Model (STM) were applied to identify service failures and corresponding recovery demands. The results show that major participation barriers include restricted service choice, inadequate information disclosure, imbalances between service rules and passenger rights and interests, service execution flaws, and failures in reward fulfillment and service response. Rigid rules restricting passengers’ ability to modify green flight options under irregular flight conditions represent the most prominent issue. These problems also show dynamic changes over time. Correspondingly, passengers’ recovery demands range from immediate remedies to systematic optimization, including responsibility-taking and rule improvement, compensation, explanations and notification, timely processing, reward fulfillment, service attitude improvement, and stronger internal governance. The findings indicate that sustainable service adoption depends not only on environmental willingness but also on whether the service system reduces participation costs and uncertainty. This study develops a “service failure–passenger demand–service recovery” framework for passenger-participatory sustainable services.