Predicting Skytrax airport rankings from customer reviews

Abstract

Skytrax audits and ranks airports internationally and also gives passenger-based satisfaction awards in its yearly ‘World Airport Awards’. These awards attract international interest and are used by some airports for promotional purposes. Yet, the airports actually audited are but a small percentage of the airports in the world, and represent only 3 per cent of the airports listed by Skytrax as open to review by passengers in its website in 2010. This research paper explores the possibility of using customers' reviews to predict Skytrax audit scores as an alternative way of ranking the remaining 97 per cent of airports. The regression formula retained correlates highly with the criterion variable, accounting for 58 per cent of its variance. These results are promising, and support the idea of re-engineering better customer reviews in order to use them as a ranking benchmark, a solution which has the potential of covering a larger population of airports and being more meaningful both to passengers and airport managers alike.