The Role of Physical Facilities in Mediating the Relationship Between Quality of Service Personnel and Service Environment on Service Perceptions of Airport Services

The Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) has been the gateway to exciting cities in South East Asia and in 2010 was ranked the 9th busiest international airport in the world. Even though KLIA has been an international airport for many years, it is difficult for it to compete with other international airport within the same categories such as the Incheon airport in Korea and Changi airport in Singapore. This scenario begs the question what are the main determinants that influence customer’s perceptions on the services offered by these international airports. In this paper, the author attempts to measure the airport stakeholders’ perception pertaining to the services offered by KLIA as one of the best airport in the world. A total of 456 respondents were selected from three types of respondent: namely passengers, airport personnel and airport tenants by using purposive quota sampling. Three predictors, service quality, service environment and service personnel were found to have medium to high correlation with the dependent variables, service perception. Further multiple regression test showed that the predictor variable, airport facilities was found to mediate the relationship between service quality and service environment on service perception. The strength of association between service quality and service environment was reduced with the introduction of the predictor, airport facilities indicating the mediating effect of airport facilities. Furthermore, the R square value increases from 0.637 to 0.642 showed the partial mediation effect of airport facilities. The outcome of the study is useful in providing the direction towards sustaining and improving not only the intangible but the tangible components of airport facilities in the country as one of the element in building the image and reputation as one of the busiest airport in the world.