Analysing Airport Travellers’ Expenditure, Satisfaction and Behavioural Intentions toward Airport Retail Services by Socio-demographics, Travel and Flight-Related Variables

Nowadays, airport practitioners are more interested in implementing marketing strategies aimed to stimulate shopping and increase airport travellers’ expenditures (e.g. Han et al., 2012): this derives from the profound changes that have influenced the airport sector. First, the commercialisation and privatisation within the industry have given airports the freedom to diversify their business in new areas and to develop their commercial policies (e.g. Hooper, 2002; Torres et al., 2005). Second, the airline companies, especially low-cost carriers, have forced airports to practice cost-cutting and efficient measures to control the level of aeronautical fees. Third, the increased frequency of travelling has rendered airport travellers more sophisticated and experienced ¬ much more demanding in their needs and wants. Fourth, there are several under-used airports around the word that need to find new ways of generating revenues (Francis, Humphreys and Ison, 2004). Despite this, very little research has been devoted so far to analysing passengers’ shopping and expenditure behaviours at airports. In this scenario, a deepen investigation about airport marketing and travellers consumption and expenditure behaviour is needed. This PhD thesis aims to contribute to deepen the scientific debate around this research area by presenting and discussing the results of three empirically and theoretically rooted studies carried out on collected data from the Olbia-Costa Smeralda International Airport (Sardinia, Italy). This PhD thesis adopts a three paper-based structure. The first paper is titled ‘Analysing Determinants of Travellers’ Expenditure Behaviour in Airports’ and aims to deepen the scientific debate on the main determinants influencing the overall (i.e. F&B and on F&B related) airport travellers expenditure behaviour. The second paper is titled ‘Analysing Determinants of Travellers’ Expenditure in Food and Beverage Services at Airports’ and aims to deepen the scientific debate on the main determinants influencing the F&B-related expenditures of airport travellers while at airports. The first paper and the second paper both it apply the Hurdle-Double Model analysing whether socio-demographics (i.e. gender, age, level of education, income and place of residence), travel-related variable (i.e. type of acommodation and travel party) and flight-related determinants (i.e. check-in mode, wait time) and the pre-intention to buy significantly influence passengers’ shopping behaviours (i.e. to buy or not to buy and the amount of money to be spent. The third paper is titled ‘Profiling airport travellers based on their perceptions, satisfaction and behavioural intentions towards food and beverage services at airports’. This study applies a factor-cluster approach to profile a sample of travellers of Olbia Airport based on their perceptions towards different service features of F&B-related retailers (e.g. ‘atmospherics’, ‘staff quality’, ‘product quality’, ‘value for money’), their level of satisfaction and their intention to recommend others (both offline and online) to shop in the airport. Further, a series of chi-squared tests were run to ascertain whether significant differences do exist among those clusters based on socio-demographics of respondents (e.g. age, gender, marital status, level of education employment status, monthly household income, place of residence), travel-related (e.g. frequency of travelling, frequency of flying) and flight-related variables (e.g. check-in modality, arrival time at the airport before flight departure).