As the technology improved this is also change the way of transporting. There are more and more options for people to determine what transport means to finish his/her journey. As a result, what people think become extremely important for a transporting company. As to airport industry, a passenger’s perception of airport service can contribute to overall airport attractiveness (Fodness and Murray, 2007). Airports constitute a major part of the aviation infrastructure and other components such as different facilities, sub-system and rules and regulations. Air side facility may include Runways, Taxiways, Apron and other facilities; Land side facilities of an airport may include Passenger Building, Cargo Facilities, Ground Transport and internal Airport.
Passenger satisfaction is a key performance indicator for airport operation (Chao et al., 2013). Generally, the “voice” of the customer can both to identify opportunities for service improvement and avoid losing valuable passenger traffic. Thus, to understand passenger satisfaction is significant for airport management.
Kaohsiung International Airport (KIA) is in the south of Taiwan, which is also the second biggest airport in this country. Since the utilization of High Speed Rail began in 2007, the domestic flight passenger volume of KIA has dropped rapidly. Next year, the regular direct flights between Taiwan and China have been permitted, which bring the opportunity of promoting the tourism to KIA. The international passenger volume recorded 4.1 million in 2014, which is also the highest number in twenty years. The number of passenger volume is crucial to the size of airport land side facilities (Tošić, 1992). To face the challenge of the upcoming increasing passenger demand, the estimation of passenger satisfaction on airport land side facilities (i.g. Terminal, luggage trolleys and so on) is important for KIA to reevaluate whether itself can fulfill passengers needs or not.
However, most of previous studies focus on the “service” provided to consumers (Fodness and Murray, 2007; Chao et al., 2013;), service means people who provide service will involve in it and thus effect consumer satisfactions. Seldom of them only focus on facilities itselves which will lead to a problem: are the facilities able to cover (i.e. the demand to be served) the demand of passengers.
In this study, we mainly focus on examining passenger's satisfaction on Airport land side facilities at KIA to understand whether the land side facilities make the passengers satisfy or not. Survey will be conducted on domestic and international passengers through online questionnaires. The questionnaires will the concern of their satisfaction and perceived level of importance regarding the airport land side facilities. The results are obtained by Description Statistics Analysis (DSA) and Importance and Satisfaction Analysis (ISA). The results can provide useful suggestions for the airport operators to improve their land side facilities.