Benchmarking of airports service quality by a new fuzzy MCDM approach

Recent approaches to the service quality evaluation problem are focused on the employment of multi-criteria decisionmaking (MCDM) procedures, since processes related to service quality evaluation presentmeaningful communality elements to MCDM ones. Based on such assumption, in the present paper a new fuzzy MCDMapproach is developed tocomparatively evaluate passenger service quality of the international airports inSicily (Italy). In particular, by incorporating the respondents confidence level and degree of optimism on fuzzy assessments, quality scores of main airport service criteria are estimated, whereas ELECTRE multi criteria decision support methodis proposed to point out theservices quality rankingfor the considered airports, on the basis of which it is performed a strategic benchmarking of service quality. The developed approach represents an effective way to perform evaluation of airports service quality, since it can support airports management to understand and to explain the relatedservice quality ranking in terms of qualityscores of service criteria.