Guidebook for Conducting Airport User Surveys (2009)

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71.1 Purpose of This Guidebook This guidebook has been developed to help airports and survey sponsors plan, design, conduct, and analyze surveys of airport users. It is intended to improve understanding of the issues involved in planning and implementing such surveys and to provide practicable methods and techniques to overcome these issues. The guidebook does not cover observational surveys of the activities of airport users. As requested by the ACRP, the team that developed this guidebook conducted research on the current state of knowledge and practice in performing airport user surveys. The research included a review of the literature, an Internet survey, and detailed interviews with selected airports and agencies regarding their current survey practices. This research and the expertise of the research team are the basis of this guidebook. A summary of the research is provided in Appendix A. The guidebook will be of interest to airport managers, planners, analysts, and consultants. It will provide airport managers with a better understanding of when surveys are required; basic sur- vey concepts and methodologies; and the time and effort required to plan, develop, and imple- ment surveys. Planners and analysts who have little experience with surveys will benefit from the detailed review of the basic concepts and the practical considerations related to specific types of surveys, such as passenger and tenant surveys. It is hoped that the guidebook will prove equally useful to readers who already have experience with surveys, by confirming that their practices have been reasonable and by providing advice and insights to augment their experience. This introduction outlines the following: • The role of surveys in airport planning, development, and management. • Basic survey concepts, such as target population and survey sampling. • The main types of surveys and survey methods. • How the guidebook can be used. 1.2 Role of Surveys in Airport Planning, Development, and Management Airport managers and planners require a wide range of information to support their planning activities and decision making. The quality of plans and decisions depends on the quality of the information on which they are based. In particular, in any customer-serving organization, such as an airport, two considerations are critical to effective planning and management: • Understanding the market. • Understanding the customer. C H A P T E R 1 Introduction

Airports function within the air transportation system and indeed within the larger transporta- tion system therefore, airport managers and planners must understand the nature of the market being served. This includes such issues as the trip purposes and travel patterns of passengers using the airport, as well as the nature of goods being shipped through the airport. Where the local travel market is served by more than one airport, it is helpful to understand relative market share and the factors that influence this. Depending on the length of the trip, travelers and shippers may also have a choice between air and surface transportation (i.e., car, bus, truck, rail, or sea). Effective planning and management of airport facilities and services also require an understand- ing of the characteristics, needs, and satisfaction of the customers using the airport, principally the air passengers and shippers but also the intermediate service providers, such as the airlines, freight forwarders, and ground transportation providers. This customer information might include air travel party sizes and the amount of baggage checked by air passengers, as well as customer satis- faction with the services provided by the airport and suggestions for how they can be improved. While some of the information needed for effective planning and management of airports can be obtained by direct observation or from statistics that are routinely collected, much cannot. Some airport user attributes are not directly observable and some statistics are not routinely collected. Airport user surveys are the only way to obtain information of this type, including the following: • Air passenger characteristics for facility planning, such as arrival time before flight departure or the number of well-wishers accompanying passengers into the terminal. • Customer satisfaction with airport facilities and services. • Air passenger and airport employee satisfaction with existing concession services and likely use of additional services. • Ground transportation used by air passengers and airport employees to travel to and from the airport, particularly public transport. • Trip origins and destinations of airport users within the region served by the airport. • Use of competing airports and the factors affecting the choice of airport. • Economic impact of the airport on the surrounding region. Having good information on the wide range of issues typically addressed by airport user sur- veys improves the quality of planning and decision making. At the same time, obtaining good information costs money. In deciding how much effort to devote to collecting this information, consider how the information will be used and the likely costs of poor planning, design or oper- ating decisions. In general, where information will be used in planning new facilities, the cost of a survey will be small compared to the cost of the facilities. The ability to appropriately size the facilities and phase future expansion could significantly reduce the cost of a project or forestall the need for expensive modifications after construction has commenced or the facilities have been opened. In planning an airport user survey, or even deciding whether one is necessary, airport planners and managers need to consider what information is already available, what additional informa- tion is needed and how accurate that information needs to be, and then balance the cost of the survey against the value of the resulting information. This is not an easy task. One goal of this guidebook is to help airport planners and managers address this issue. 1.3 Survey Concepts For readers who are considering performing a survey for the first time or have limited expe- rience with surveys, this section provides an overview of the basic concepts and some of the common terminology used in survey practice. 8 Guidebook for Conducting Airport User Surveys

The purpose of an airport user survey is to gather information about the characteristics or opinions of a defined group of airport users, such as air passengers using the airport or those employed at the airport. This group is referred to as the target population to be surveyed (often shortened to population). In general, it is not practical to gather the desired information from every member of the target population, so a subgroup of the target population is selected. This subgroup is referred to as the sample. The process of performing a survey involves selecting an appropriate sample, requesting the desired information from each member of the sample, ana- lyzing the responses and reporting the resulting findings. The process of performing a survey starts by planning each of these steps. When planning a survey, consideration needs to be given to clearly defining the target popu- lation, as well as deciding how large a sample is required and how to select the sample of respon- dents. These are not always obvious decisions. For example, in performing an air passenger survey, is the target population all passengers using the airport in a given period, including those con- necting between flights, or only those starting their air trip at this airport? Is the target population only departing passengers, or does it include arriving passengers as well? The answers to these ques- tions will affect the survey methodology as well as the approach to selecting the sample. Guidance on addressing these issues is provided in Chapter 4, “Survey Design.” Ideally, a survey sample would be randomly selected individuals from the target population, where random selection means that any individual in the target population has an equal likeli- hood of being selected. This random selection is necessary to be able to make inferences from the sample about the characteristics of the target population with known statistical confidence. However, in practice such random selection is often difficult to achieve. The methods used to select survey respondents inevitably constrain the selection so that it is rarely completely random. For example, if an air passenger survey of selected flights is conducted in airline gate lounges, the sample is necessarily restricted to those passengers in the lounges in question, who are generally passengers on the flight about to depart from that gate. The respondents on any given flight will generally have a different distribution of characteristics from the target population as a result of the specific market served by the flight, the time at which the flight departs, and possibly other factors, such as the airline in question. Even if the flights to be surveyed have been randomly selected, it is unlikely that the selected flights will cover all possible combinations of market, airline, time of day, and day of week, because of budgetary limitations on the number of flights that can be included in the survey. The smaller the number of flights sampled, the less likely it is that the characteristics of the passengers on those flights will correspond exactly to those of the target population as a whole. A sample in which the distribution of characteristics in the sample differs from the population is referred to as a biased sample. An important aspect of planning a survey is designing a sampling strategy to reduce potential bias and applying techniques to control for any bias that remains. These techniques involve assigning weights to each response, so that the weighted results more closely cor- respond to the expected distribution of the characteristics of the target population. Of course, this implies some knowledge of that expected distribution and a method to calculate the response weights. These issues are discussed in more detail later in this guidebook, in the chapters specific to each type of survey. Having selected the sample, the survey respondents are then asked to provide the desired information through the use of a survey instrument or questionnaire1. The design of the survey Introduction 9 1 Survey instrument is broader than questionnaire as it includes, for example, data recording sheets in observational surveys. The airport user surveys discussed in this guidebook exclude observational surveys and the term questionnaire is used through- out this guidebook.

instrument is critical, because the wording and sequence of questions will affect the responses that are obtained. Consideration needs to be given to how the survey will be performed, includ- ing how respondents will be selected and whether they will be interviewed by survey staff or com- plete a questionnaire themselves. Once an initial design of the questionnaire has been completed, it should be pre-tested on potential respondents to make sure that the wording of the questions is clear and the survey gen- erates the desired information. The results of the pre-test may call for some redesign of the instrument and possibly another pre-test. When the questionnaire has been finalized, a pilot test is usually performed to test the survey procedures in the field. Typically, the pilot test will involve a representative group of the survey interviewers, or field staff, and should be performed well enough in advance of the full survey that any logistical issues can be resolved before the survey gets underway. After the survey data collection has been completed, the data will generally need to be checked and cleaned to correct identifiable errors (e.g., misspellings) and determine whether to eliminate incomplete or invalid responses before the results are tabulated or analyzed. Depending on the length and nature of the questionnaire, data cleaning can involve a significant amount of work. However, this step is crucial to the quality of the results. In summary, the basic survey concepts are: • Target population—a defined group of airport users for which information is required. • Survey sample—a subgroup of the target population selected to provide the desired information. • Sampling strategy—a strategy to reduce and control potential bias in the survey sample (i.e., the extent to which the characteristics or opinions of the sample differ from the target population). • Questionnaire—the mechanism to collect information from the survey sample. • Surveying method—the method used to collect information from the sampled respondents. • Pre-test—testing of a questionnaire with a small number of potential respondents. • Pilot test—testing of the entire survey process. • Data cleaning—correction of identifiable errors and elimination of incomplete or invalid responses before the survey results are tabulated and analyzed. These concepts are dealt with in more depth in subsequent sections. 1.4 Main Survey Types and Methods Airport user surveys come in many types, each with its own set of goals and objectives. The main types considered in this guidebook are passenger surveys (Chapter 5), employee surveys (Chapter 6), tenant surveys (Chapter 7), surveys of area residents (Chapter 8), surveys of area businesses (Chapter 9), and air cargo surveys (Chapter 10). Passenger surveys are the most common type of airport user survey and tend to focus on pas- senger characteristics, passenger demands on facilities, or passenger satisfaction with the airport. Passenger surveys are used for airport planning and management. Employee surveys are typically conducted to measure satisfaction with airport facilities and services, obtain information for transportation or concession planning, and address issues such as communications and knowledge of airport procedures. Tenant surveys tend to focus on tenants’ satisfaction with the airport as a landlord and on gathering information to help determine the economic impacts of the airport. Surveys of the general public can be undertaken for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the most common purposes are determining the public’s perceptions of an airport, investigating the factors 10 Guidebook for Conducting Airport User Surveys

that influence airport choice, and assessing the extent to which area residents are choosing to fly from other airports. Surveys of area businesses are frequently done as part of studies to determine the economic impact of the airport and its value to the community. Surveys may also be conducted to collect information on travel by local business people and their use of all the airports in the region to assist in airport planning and air service development studies. Air cargo surveys address any aspects of the movement of air cargo at the airport, including cargo moving on all-cargo aircraft or in the belly holds of passenger aircraft, and transit cargo that arrives and departs by road. 1.5 How to Use This Guidebook The guidebook has been structured so that readers can easily find the information that is most important to them. Topics and the chapters in which they are addressed follow: • The role of surveys, basic concepts, and main survey types: Chapter 1. • The steps and related considerations in planning and implementing any survey: Chapter 2. • Underlying concepts of sampling and statistical accuracy required for airport user surveys: Chapter 3. • The factors—such as sampling strategy, questionnaire design, survey period and interviewer training—that will need to be considered in the design of a particular survey: Chapter 4. • Specific issues and advice related to passenger surveys: Chapter 5. • Specific issues and advice related to employee surveys: Chapter 6. • Specific issues and advice related to tenant surveys: Chapter 7. • Specific issues and advice related to surveys of residents of the area served by an airport: Chapter 8. • Specific issues and advice related to surveys of area businesses and other organizations: Chapter 9. • Specific issues and advice related to surveys of air cargo activities: Chapter 10. The table of contents provides a detailed listing of the topics covered in the guidebook and can be used to locate information on particular topics that may be of interest. Introduction 11