Data analytics of Skytrax's airport review and ratings: Views of airport quality by passengers types

Abstract

This study investigates the perception of passengers of airport service attributes, using data from the Skytrax Airport Review websites. Overall, a total of 7358 reviews were collected from the website, together with other related passenger data, namely review headers, passenger types, rating scores of airport attributes and the overall rating. This study focused on investigating each group of passenger types to identify underlying differences amongst airport's passenger segmentation, particularly on the leisure travellers. The study performed different techniques of data analysis including sentiment analysis, lemmatization and partial least square – structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) to reveal key patterns derived from the available data, which the normal survey data or the interview data may not have revealed. The research contributes to airport passenger segmentation by highlighting the differences found in the travellers segmented by Skytrax. The study also provides practical implications to airport managers.