Assessing air transport performance by means of a quality index

The investigation aimed at defining an experimental function for assessing the quality and efficiency of service provided by an airline from the passenger point of view. For this purpose a number of indicators have been identified and analysed in an attempt to determine the level of performance achieved and the user perception of quality of the service offered. Quality and efficiency of air transport have been described by analysing and processing the following parameters: - cost index - recovery index - comfort index - connection efficiency index - adaptation index - delay index - safety index To enable calculation of the above indexes a passenger survey was conducted, distributing questionnaires to be completed by travellers so as to gather the information necessary for correctly evaluating the weight of each index within the function identified. The service efficiency index was obtained by developing and processing an experimental relation consisting of the weighted combination of the above indexes, so as to determine air transport service performance. The function obtained has the following form: Ieff = b1* icomf – b2* ir + b3* ieff coll – b4* ia + b5* ip + b6* is Where bi are the weights. The weights were determined on the basis of survey data and in particular processing the answers respondents to the second question. The efficiency index constructed in this way was then tested to assess the efficiency of the service on the domestic Cagliari-to-Rome flight which is briefly described in the paper.