A decision rules approach for improvement of airport service quality

The passenger's perception of the airport's level of service (LOS) may have a significant impact on promoting or discouraging future tourism and business activities. In this study, we take a look at this problem, but unlike in traditional statistical analysis, we apply a new method, the dominance-based rough set approach (DRSA), to an airport service survey. A set of "if ... then ... " decision rules is used in the preference model. The passengers indicate their perception of airport LOS by rating a set of criteria/attributes. The proposed method provides practical information that should be of help to airport planners, designers, operators, and managers to develop LOS improvement strategies. The model was implemented using survey data from a large sample of customers from an international airport in Taiwan. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.