Message from the Director General

Celebrating the 2018 ASQ Winners

March 2019

Dear Colleagues,

Our industry is growing and evolving, and airports are now sophisticated businesses that increasingly prioritize delivering a high quality of customer experience as a means of boosting their competitiveness. As such we are proud to report that airports worldwide are committed to continuous service improvement as we celebrate the winners of the 2018 Airport Service Quality (ASQ) Awards. The Awards recognize those airports that deliver the best customer experience in the opinion of their own passengers.

I remind our readers that ASQ is the world’s only airport passenger service and benchmarking programme measuring passengers’ satisfaction on their day of travel. Some 400 airports across 90 countries participate in the programme which provides the research tools and management information to help airports understand passengers’ views and what they value from an airport’s products and services.

We welcome the continuous improvement of perennial high-performance airports around the world, including Indianapolis International Airport, Beijing Capital International Airport, Singapore Changi Airport, Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport, Delhi’s, Indira Gandhi International Airport, Shanghai Pudong International Airport, and Sheremetyevo International Airport. We note the return of former first-time winners Toronto Pearson and Aeroporto di Roma-Fiumicino.

And, to ensure that the ASQ programme keeps pace with the changes we see in the airports industry, we have adjusted the awards and launched new awards including Best Environment and Ambience by Size, Best Customer Service by Size, Best Infrastructure and Facilitation by Size and Best Airport Experience in Arrivals. This is being done so that more high-performance airports will be recognized since many more airports are earning very high scores from their customers.

Consequently, this year a number of airports have won their first ASQ Award, including Aeropuerto Internacional Ramón Villeda Morales in Honduras, as well as Dublin, Oslo, Helsinki, Southampton, Bristol, and London City airports. Spain’s Aeropuerto de Almería, Aeropuerto de Girona, Aeropuerto de Melilla, Aeropuerto de Zaragoza, and Aeropuerto de Alicante-Elche are also first-time winners. Fort McMurray Airport in Canada and Muscat Airport in Oman are also newcomers to the ASQ Awards fraternity.

We will celebrate the achievements of all winning airports at the ASQ Awards Ceremony which will be held during the second ACI Customer Experience Global Summit, to be held in partnership with PT Angkasa Pura I (Persero) from 2 to 5 September in Bali, Indonesia. The Summit, expected to attract more than 400 delegates, will comprise three main elements: an international ASQ Forum, a Customer Excellence Global Summit, and the prestigious annual ASQ Awards ceremony.

The event, as well as the ASQ programme is dedicated to helping airport operators understand and meet the ever-changing needs of their customers by exploring trends in passenger experience. We know from the ASQ Barometer that, in 2018, overall passenger satisfaction on a global level, increased to 4.21 from 4.19 year over year, and ASQ is dedicated to ensuring that this trend continues as the industry faces new challenges and opportunities in the years ahead.

As part of this commitment, ACI will launch the Customer Experience Accreditation programme at our upcoming ACI Asia-Pacific/World Annual General Assembly, Conference, and Exhibition, taking place in Hong Kong from 2 to 4 April 2019. The programme is designed as a multilevel accreditation developed to assess the level of maturity of an airport in managing its delivery of customer experience and service quality.

This Accreditation has two major objectives: to provide a marketing tool to communicate and promote the airport’s efforts to improve its customer experience among stakeholders; and to develop a multilevel review/audit process in order to create a common framework, guiding airports in customer-experience management.

Depending on its level of maturity in customer-experience management, each participating airport will be evaluated based on the guidelines of eight customer-experience management domains. As its maturity levels increase, the Accreditation assessment will require the member to demonstrate more advanced practices in airport customer-experience management.

I invite you all to take part in the customer experience revolution underway by joining the ASQ family, taking advantage of ACI’s products and service, and celebrate our most diverse group of ASQ Award winners yet.