Quality and Safety Performance in a Regional Airport: Comparing passengers' and employees' perceptions with KPI

In this study, a passengers' satisfaction questionnaire developed for a small regional airport in Italy was modified and adopted to ask employees' perceptions for the quality and safety performance of the airport. Employees' perceptions were elicited on topics aligned to those used in the customers satisfaction survey and the results were compared also considering quality and safety performance indicators as objective anchor point for the performance of the company. The findings indicate interesting areas of differences in the perceptions of the passengers and employees regarding company's services and their performance, both useful in highlighting necessary areas of improvements. A passenger satisfaction model was developed using an ordinal logistic regression approach to verify whether perceptions related to airport performance for safety and security were deemed to be significant in respect to the overall passengers' satisfaction. Notably for passengers comfort and information have a notable positive effect on their satisfaction while characteristics related to safety and security do not have a very considerable effect. Furthermore, the KPI used to check the safety performance of the airport highlighted possible deficiencies in the reporting and safety culture of the airport. The employees were also asked to suggest possible areas of improvement and the redistribution of the workforce for better matching between roles and responsibilities was among the chief aspect highlighted as critical areas of improvement.