The quality of air transport service

Abstract

The socioeconomic development of a country necessarily relies on the improvement of all transport services. With the introduction of new technologies, transport industry has developed considerably in recent years, and as a consequence people habits and travel choices changed as well. In this context, air transport has a significant role, and it could be considered one of the most significant contributors to the advancement of modern society. Evaluating air transport service quality is important as it is for the other public transport systems. Airport facilities and services are the first experiences that a passenger receives upon arrival. For this reason, providing airport services characterized by high levels of quality is very important to make the travel more pleasant for the passengers, with the final objective to attract more users. Therefore, measuring the levels of airport services by evaluating passengers’ satisfaction with them is essential to understand the needs of customers. In the same way, with the airlines’ deregulation the number of airlines entered into the air transport industry significantly increased, causing a stronger competition. In this context, it is evident that provided service quality, as well as passengers’ satisfaction, play an important role also in the airlines marketing strategies. While literature regarding the evaluation of road and rail public transport service quality is well established from many years, literature concerning air transport service quality is relatively recent. A first substantial issue that emerges from the air transport related literature concerns the complexity of the various characteristics of the services, which can relate to the airport managing companies and to the airlines. For this reason, the major part of the studies treats separately these two groups of service. Specifically, the researchers analysed air transport services by distinguishing the concerning the services offered in the airports from the ones provided by the airlines. The aim of this thesis work is to give a contribution to the existing literature, by applying various techniques and models for analysing both airport and airlines’ service quality. As suggested by the literature, also in this work the airport services have been treated separately by the airlines’ services. In fact, two different data samples were analysed. Specifically, the International airport of Lamezia Terme (Italy) has been considered as case study for the airport services. Otherwise, data collected by an online survey conducted at the University of Calabria (Italy) became object of study for the airlines’ services analyses. Several tools have been tested and proposed. The obtained results could be considered not only as a research contribution, but also as starting point to help air transport managers and providers in choosing the effective strategy for providing services characterized by adequate levels of quality.