6. Conclusions
Although airports' profitability nowadays largely relies on nonaeronautical or commercial activities, research aimed at analysing perceived service quality (SQ) and the satisfaction of passengers consuming foods and beverages (F&B) in airport areas is still lacking. This study aimed to deepen the scientific debate around this topic. The findings are relevant for both researchers and practitioners and mainly contribute to the third of the research questions that need to be studied according to Graham (2008), namely, “to analyse the SQ provided by the F&B retailers in airports”. From a theoretical point of view, this paper suggests that fuzzy numbers can be considered an appropriate methodology to measure SQ, reducing the uncertainty associated with linguistic information. Specifically, it proposes a fuzzy logic approach to compute a satisfaction index (SQI) for certain segments of passengers purchasing F&B at Olbia Airport using 13 attributes. To the best of authors' knowledge, this is the first time that fuzzy logic has been proposed to analyse SQ in this service sector context: F&B retailers in airports. Furthermore, it highlights that age is a moderating factor in consumers' satisfaction in this specific service setting, as in others; specifically, our findings show that older passengers are less satisfied than their counterparts, suggesting that they can be considered more critical and demanding when seeking, consuming and evaluating F&B retailers in airports. Assuming that passengers form an overall opinion of F&B retailers at the airport by weighing up the different dimensions that make up the overall SQ on an individual basis, the SQI constructed by the model in this study reflects the pattern quite well.
