How has airport service quality changed in the context of COVID-19: A data-driven crowdsourcing approach based on sentiment analysis

Highlights

• Leverage Google Maps reviews to examine airport service quality (ASQ) in the U.S.

• Classify sentiment of ASQ topics using fine-grained sentiment analysis.

• Use statistical models to investigate the key ASQ topics and their impact on rating.

• Airport rating is significantly related to check-in, environment, and personnel.

• Passengers show more positive attitude toward environment and personnel during COVID-19.

Abstract

Airport service quality (ASQ) is a competitive advantage for airport management in today's airport market. Since the COVID-19 health crisis has unprecedentedly influenced airport regulations and operations, effective measurement of ASQ has become crucial for airport administrations. Surveying travelers' attitudes is useful for ASQ assessment but collecting responses could be time-consuming and costly. Therefore, this paper adopts a data-driven crowdsourcing approach to study ASQ during the COVID-19 pandemic by investigating Google Maps reviews from the 98 busiest U.S. airports. To do so, this study develops a topical ontology of keywords regarding ASQ attributes and uses a sentiment tool to derive passengers' attitudes. Through sentiment analysis, Google Maps reviews show more positive sentiment toward environment and personnel but remain constant about facilities during COVID-19. The lexical salience-valence analysis (LSVA) is then applied to explain such changes by tracking the sentiment of frequent words in reviews. Through correlation and regression analysis, this study demonstrates that rating is significantly related to check-in, environment, and personnel in pre-and post-COVID periods. Additionally, the effect of access, wayfinding, facilities, and environment on rating significantly differs between the two periods. The findings illustrate the effectiveness of leveraging online reviews and offer practical implications for what matters to air travelers, especially in the COVID-19 context.