A Study of the Influence of Service Quality on Passenger Satisfaction: The Context of Suvarnabhumi International Airport

Abstract

Airports are places where people have the potential to experience either satisfaction or frustration. One of the key challenges for them is how to provide service quality and to ensure passenger satisfaction. This research was done to gain a better understanding of the influence of service quality on customer satisfaction at Suvarnabhumi International Airport, Bangkok. The SERVQUAL approach via convenient sampling (n=443) was used. This approach considered tangibility, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy.

The study had five specific objectives (a) To analyze the demographic factor. (b) To determine how the service quality dimensions impact passengers’ satisfaction. (c) To determine the level of passengers’ satisfaction on the service quality dimension. (d) To seek a correlation between the service quality dimension and the level of satisfaction. (e) To relate service quality to five demographic factors. Results indicated that three dimensions were highly significant, namely tangibles (ß = .197, p< 0.01), assurance (ß = .165, p<0.01), and empathy (ß = .358, p< 0.01). However, in relation to the five democratic factors: gender, age, nationality, number of times travelled and purpose, only the purpose factor was found significant (p value < .05). Based on ratings, 57.79 percentage passengers, rated Suvarnabhumi airport good. The study implies more attention has to be given to on the dimensions of reliability and responsiveness.