مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

Increasing wealth is driving the growth of demand of air travel both globally and regionally. However this growth has created its own challenges especially to the passenger experience, which has suffered because of uneven growth parity between infrastructure and number of passenger. This infrastructure bottleneck often compromises the values that airport delivers to its passengers and airlines. The growth of air travel has also increased the demand for airport services and mandated for more efficient process of service deliveries to its customer. It has also catalyzed the competition among airport operators to improve value proposition to its customer. The airlines seek to make their operations hub at the airport operating efficiently in order to reduce their costs and increase the quality of services rendered to their passengers (Oum et al., 2003). Efficiency and service quality are key performance indicators for the operation of airport, which needs to be trade off to optimize the performance.

Efficiency evaluation of airport is widely used and applied in management of airport, which are mostly based on comparative analysis of airport’s economic or operational performance, employing Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Total Factor Productivity (TFP) (ATRS, 2004; Park, 2003). Although the efficiency evaluation of airport indicates the improvement areas however it fails to give managers, a quality perspective on the services provided, which may compromise sustainable development (Fernandes and Pacheco, 2002; Pacheco and Fernandes, 2003).

With the advent of commercialization, marketization and competition in airport business arena, the philosophy of airport management is undergoing transformation where customer service quality and customer delight are emphasized. For instance, in 2015, 300 airports across 80 countries participated in Airport Service Quality (ASQ) survey organized by Airport Council International (ACI) (Airport Council International, 2016). Hence evaluating and improving the quality of service are main concerns of modern airport business. Many studies are conducted on evaluation of the quality of airline services but only few literature in this context are available for airport. Hence the changing nature of airport business has necessitated for research in this context.