Customer questionnaires and interviews

Provided that they are well designed, questionnaires can be effective tools for collecting customer information. Factors such as “why” limitations, bias, validity, meaningfulness and reliability must be considered (Goetsch & Davis, 2004) for the questionnaire to be designed and structured appropriately to provide valid customer feedback. If the right questions are asked, surveys can provide a great deal of feedback. Analysis of the information provided in this feedback can be used to improve the customer experience. For example, as a result of passenger surveys, the British Airport Authority (BAA) airports prioritise customer service issues – such as acceptable queuing times at check-in and security – when improving key areas of passenger experience (Consumer Protection Group, 2009).

Questionnaires have many different uses in airport research. They are used to understand the greatly varying demographics of passengers; for example, the nationality, age, reason for travel, and frequency of travel (Tourism Forecasting Committee, 2009b). Questionnaires are considered an efficient method of directly determining passengers needs (Yeh & Kuo, 2003). The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) survey (Consumer Protection Group, 2009), for example, found that while passengers using budget airlines expect a lower level of in-flight service, they expect similar in-airport service and processing times (Myant & Abraham, 2009). This is very important information for airports as the increase in the number of budget airlines (where passengers are often paying very low prices compared to the full-service airlines), has grown substantially over the past decade. However, surveys conflict on the importance of income from low-budget airline passengers in the context of overall airport revenue. Some research shows budget passengers contribute greater than average use of in-airport services from the low cost carriers (Barrett, 2004; Graham, 2009), while other research shows the same or less income (Castillo-Manzano, 2009). The authors fail to make it clear what factors contribute to the conflicting results. Further research would be required to understand the contributing factors.

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Surveys also illustrate the key issues in the overall departure and arrival experience. The CAA passenger survey (Consumer Protection Group, 2009) found that the two key drivers for satisfaction during the departure experience were: time taken to get through the airport; and reliable information on flight times and departure gates. This overlaps with the findings of Caves and Pickard (2001), who showed that safety, time, and the elimination of unknowns are the most important factors for passenger “wellbeing”, or satisfaction. Other key issues identified for a positive overall experience were helpfulness and customer service attitudes of staff, and the amount of seating available airside (Consumer Protection Group, 2009).

An interesting measurement was used by BAA in its quality service monitoring, where passengers were asked how long they had waited. Analysis showed that passengers thought they had waited in security queues ‘significantly’

longer than performance data reported (as cited in Consumer Protection Group, 2009, p. 13). This may be due to a difference in passenger recall, or a difference in where measurement starts and finishes. This comparison of actual times and perceived times, and perceived times and passenger satisfaction scores is an insightful measurement. It shows what actual times and perceived times passengers are satisfied with, and can allow ‘interventions’ – activities to reduce the perceived time taken in queuing – to be put in place. These activities can, therefore, increase satisfaction ratings without speeding up the time of processing (Transportation Research Board of the National Academies, 2008). However, the research does not explain what interventions could be put in place, and further research using passenger observation is suggested by the Transportation Research Board.

Interventions have been used in other industries to improve customer satisfaction with queuing and included interventions that could be put in place, improving on the airport experience research. For example, theme parks have curved their waiting lines. This tactic demonstrates a reduction in the length of time that customers think they have queued (Norman, 2009). Theme parks have also provided entertainment to engage people while queuing. This also reduces the perceived waiting time as customers are kept mentally active watching the entertainment, and are not focused on the length of time spent in the queue (Norman, 2009). The approach used by Norman was through observational research and not questionnaires. Therefore observation may be a more useful methodology to use to

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understand how to improve queuing experience. Observation is discussed further in Section 3.7.

The use of questionnaires to understand the passenger experience also suffers from the problem of how the questions originated. Yeh and Kuo (2003) argue that much of the past research is typically designed from a managerial rather than passenger focused. This means that questionnaires are asking passengers about what a manager thinks is important to them. As there is a difference in what is important to customers, and what managers consider important to the customer, this can ultimately result in misguided efforts to improve the customer experience, and failure to address customers’ actual needs and desires (Yeh & Kuo, 2003). Fodness and Murray (2007) agree with this view, arguing that changes to the passenger experience that are based on data determined from a manager’s perspective may fail to improve the passenger experience. These changes focus on the most obvious and easily workable from the management perspective.

Norman (2002) takes this view further, arguing that focusing on a manager’s point-of-view leads to overlooking the problems that consumers actually encounter.

He argues that those close to a product or service may not see the problems that consumers may have. Even when managers become users, their deep understanding of a product or service informs their use of that product or service. An infrequent user, on the other hand, must rely almost entirely on knowledge they have gained through previous analogous experiences.

Fodness and Murray (2007) claim to have improved on previous research by concentrating on measuring passengers’ expectations. They took passenger responses from an unspecified airport website and used data from in-depth interviews and focus groups to compile a model of passenger expectations of the airport experience. The study shows that the services available to passengers during their discretionary time are critical to the way in which they view their experience. The authors argue that current research lacks a “comprehensive profile of the experiences, expectations and perceptual influences of passengers” at airports (Fodness & Murray, 2007, p. 493), and that a more explicit and systematic investigation of customers’ activity goals is needed to fill this gap. However, the authors have not published a comprehensive profile of passenger experience.

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Another questionnaire survey tool has been used in the airport industry on a world-wide scale, giving an unprecedented number of respondents (Skytrax, 2009).

In 2008/9 more than 8.6 million questionnaires were completed by airline passengers from over 95 countries, and 9.8 million were completed in 2009/2010 (Skytrax, 2010). The results of this questionnaire led to the regional ranking of the top twenty airports in the world; for example, the top three in Europe, or in Australasia (Section 3.3). This is a valuable source of information on the satisfaction levels of passengers at the various airports around the world. However, Skytrax do not state (on their website) how the aspects of passenger satisfaction measured were selected. These aspects could have, again, originated from an airport management perspective. The questionnaires would therefore, suffer from originating from a management perspective, thus failing to consider problems that passengers themselves actually encounter (Norman, 2002; Yeh & Kuo, 2003). Skytrax allows passengers to identify actual problems encountered during their airport experience on the Skytrax website;

however, this data does not appear to be used in the survey results. It is also not clear from the website how this information was fed back to individual airports, or if the airports are using the information provided by passengers to improve passenger experience.

The Transportation Research Board of the National Academies (2008) reviewed the Skytrax website and two other websites that investigate passenger satisfaction through on-line passenger questionnaires. They documented the issues commonly identified by passengers as having a negative or positive effect on their experience, and these include:

 way-finding

 vertical transition between levels

 walking distance

 availability of self-service check-in

 queue length

The Transportation Research Board concluded the research by discussing innovations that have solved the various problems identified through the passenger review. These innovations were evaluated against two criteria: their ability to mitigate the perceived problems; and their ability to address specific issues of

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particular airports. Whether multiple innovations could be combined to enhance the overall passenger experience was also considered. However, the research only investigated the landside passenger experience, and did not consider the issues and innovations once passengers were airside. This approach does not take account of the complete experience, but concentrates only on how passengers are processed.

Customer questionnaires and surveys are useful tools for airports in identifying passenger’s problems. However, like benchmarking, they are reactive measures to problems that have been allowed to escalate to become significant enough for passengers to report them. The questionnaires lack a passenger focus, although they discuss taking this focus, their origins can be traced back to the management perspective. For example, the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies (2008) research used the surveys from Skytrax (2007, 2010), whose surveys may have originated from the management perspective. The management perspective is argued to miss what is important to the passenger (Norman, 2002; Yeh

& Kuo, 2003).