The World Airport Survey and Airport Customer Satisfaction Survey (WACSS) are the largest, global Passenger surveys of airport product and standards.

The strength of WACSS is the requirement for it to be completed by customers after the travel experience. This may be 1 day, a week or even 1 month following their airport use, but it ensures a more balanced level of critique and judgement when compared to on-the-day intercept interviews which are shown to produce skewed and inaccurate results.

The promotion and marketing of the WACSS Questionnaire by each airport to it's customers can be tailored to specific needs and wishes.

The World Airports Customer Satisfaction Survey (WACSS) offers a unique survey and analysis format. Airport operators have the opportunity to measure passenger opinions in over 90 different product and service areas, with the benefit of integrated competitive performance data. WACSS provides this at a fraction of the cost for existing survey methods.

WACSS utilises a proven, customer questionnaire format, with the scale of study targeted to provide competitive performance data for over 500 airports worldwide.

Airport operators can select different passenger types to participate at any point of the study - targeting for example arrivals, transit, check- in, immigration/security at either different or similar study periods of the survey.

Existing passenger survey methods rely upon passenger intercept interviews, during the airport travel chain experience - targeting departure gates or arrivals hall.

WACSS offers a more thought-out approach to gathering most beneficial feedback, using the concept that memories a customer takes away from their trip experience are the most influential in their assessment and final perception of product and service quality across an airport environment.

This more considered and balanced perception delivers the most balanced and honest opinions - after the trip experience, rather than those impacted by "heat of the moment" or stressful influences.

WACSS survey structure is related to a more recent phenomenon amongst survey respondents, demonstrating that a customer is up to 50 per cent more likely to give totally honest ratings and feedback to survey questions when completing these online - versus passenger intercept systems.

WACSS actively engages the respondents - so they can think carefully about every question before giving their response.

Whilst the prime objective for every airport is to achieve the highest levels of satisfaction for their own customers, it is important to evaluate performance on a wider, competitive platform - for the necessary emphasis to be directed at continuous Quality improvement.

A unique advantage of WACSS, is that it provides each airport operator not only with analysis of their own passenger survey responses - but delivers the Stage 2 Competitive Performance analysis. This delivers a competitive performance evaluation rating on the basis of headline questions, and is published for internal airport operator use only (with no outside publication of results).

For more information about World Airport Surveys, please contact :

Mr Peter Miller
Director Marketing
SKYTRAX GROUP

Email: miller@airlinequality.com