Measuring Quality of Service in Airport Passenger Terminals

Assessment of airport passenger terminal performance provides valuable feedback to airport managers. Researchers and practitioners alike have recognized that measuring terminal performance through purely operational approaches (i.e., on the basis of airport ability to process passengers and baggage) is not sufficient. Innovative techniques used to study passenger needs and their perception of service quality have been developed during the past few decades. A new generation of terminal assessment models incorporating issues such as comfort, convenience, and ambience in the evaluation models has emerged. Existing models vary according to the type of decisions supported, evaluation perspective, type of measurements, and evaluation approach used. The state of the art and the state of the practice regarding methods and techniques for assessing the performance of airport passenger terminals are reviewed, their capabilities and limitations are identified, and issues that should be further researched are proposed.