Airport Performance - a multifarious review of literature

Abstract

This paper reviews literature covering three broad categories of airport performance: productivity and efficiency, financial performance, and service quality and passenger satisfaction. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) has become the overwhelmingly dominant method for airport productivity and efficiency studies, in large part due to the lack of publicly accessible data. The effects of ownership and regulations on airport efficiency appear to be of the most interest to researchers. However, sustainability has increasingly become one of the top priorities for many airports, thus we start to see more research incorporate environmental factors in evaluating airport productivity and efficiency. In contrast to the vast volume of literature on airport productivity and efficiency, published works on airport financial performance are scarce with most simply comparing various ratios reflecting unit revenues, unit cost and some forms of profitability, which indicates an indisputable need for more research in the area. There has been a rapid growth in literature on airport service quality over the last decade, mostly focusing on examining drivers for passenger satisfaction. Advancements in data mining and text mining techniques have led to increasing use of user generated contents from web-based platforms instead of traditional questionnaire surveys as data sources by studies of airport service quality and passenger satisfaction.