Investigating the perceived quality of airport accessibility to define regional development strategies

The development of an area can be affected by the success of the air transport system serving it. A fundamental aspect characterizing an airport is its accessibility, which today assumes a comprehensive concept, involving several aspects relating to how easily and efficiently people can get to and from the airport, but also on the ease of movement and service inside the airport, for all travellers, including those with disabilities. The aim of this paper is to verify which dimensions of external and internal accessibility are the strongest predictors of overall perceived accessibility quality, and if the predictive strengths of these factors vary across different passenger demographics (e.g., age, travel purpose). The work is supported by a study case focused on the Lamezia Terme airport, placed in Calabria, a region of the southern Italy. The collected data refer to cross-sectional surveys addressed to the passengers of the analysed airport in 2022 and 2023. A Cumulative Link Mixed Model (CLMM), incorporating random effects, has been calibrated to identify the factors most influencing the quality of airport accessibility, and some other models have been calibrated relating to different groups of passengers to verify the variability of perceptions. From the models, the main predictors of perceived overall accessibility quality refer to the internal accessibility aspects, as well as the level of perceived accessibility quality increases for the air passengers using car parking and decreases for the passengers using the website. Finally, passengers’ perceptions vary more as a function of carrier type and travel purpose.