Passenger Satisfaction in European Airports

Transportation is most often seen as just part of the tourism system. Among transportation types, air transport involves an important part of a broader travel and tourism sector. Thanks to air transport, the shortening of the transport time increases the average time in a destination where tourists spend time. Also, airports provide the physical and social environment in which all parties come together in the production of air transport services. On the other hand, airports represent the prestige of the country. Passenger satisfaction on airport services is an important first step for holiday satisfaction of holidaymakers because airports are the start and the end points of journeys. Therefore, airports may have a significant influence on the passengers in order to support future tourism. For this reason, it is important for airport management to assess the level of passenger satisfaction in terms of airport services. The first step of tourist’s satisfaction is satisfaction in airports which depends on various factors. Thus, it is important to identify which factors in the airport are unpleasant and which factors are enhancers of passenger satisfaction. Since there are a lot of airports in European countries, the first 100 airports receiving the highest number of passengers are chosen for this study. Our analysis is based on a sample data obtained from Skytrax. First, maps are drawn according to the cleaning, terminal settings, queuing, and overall satisfaction factors in airports in European countries. Then, we seek to find the factors affecting the overall satisfaction. The airport ownership, seating capacity, cleaning, queuing time, and the number of passengers are considered as the variables to explain the overall satisfaction. We observed that while the airport ownership and also the number of passengers are not statistically significant on the overall satisfaction, the queuing time is the main factor in explaining the overall satisfaction in European Airports.