The U.S. airport industry’s passenger sentiment score last week declined 0.4% to 8.24 out of 10.0, just a bit shy of the industry pre-pandemic benchmark of 8.3.
October 7, 2022 @ 10am EDT
During the past 7 calendar days, the U.S. airport industry’s overall sentiment score declined 0.4% to 8.24 versus 8.27 for the previous week. Travel delays and air travel chaos are continuing into the fall season, primarily due to staffing shortages. For example, Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport offered security workers a pay raise of 20% on average to try to solve ongoing staff shortages. Schiphol, one of Europe’s busiest airports, has grappled with long passenger queues for months and has cut capacity by almost a fifth until at least March 2023 due to the lack of security staff.
GlidePathCX continues to engage millions of airport passengers each week by reaching passengers on their mobile and laptop devices while they are in the airport. The majority of these electronic communications contained a Passenger Experience Survey, with overall sentiment measured on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being the best).
GlidePathCX’s Sentiment Score was calculated for each airport on a near real-time basis via the company’s proprietary Insight360SM dashboard. The resulting data was then aggregated to calculate a sentiment score for the U.S. airport industry as a whole.
For the week ending October 7th, the percentage of business traveler respondents was significantly higher than in previous weeks: 24.5% for business travelers vs. 75.5% for leisure travelers. In previous weeks the percentage of business travelers has hovered at around 20%, so this week’s figure is a significant increase for business travelers as a percentage of overall passenger volume.
According to Reuters, strikes and staff shortages forced airlines to cancel thousands of flights to avoid hours-long queues at major airports in the first summer following widespread COVID lockdowns, with disruptions set to continue deep into the autumn.
GlidePathCX will continue to closely monitor airport passenger sentiment and related insights and trends.
