Customer satisfaction is a key issue for every company wishing to increase customer loyalty and thereby create a better business performance. As such, considerable research and revenue has been invested in developing an accurate survey process for the assessment of consumer satisfaction. In this paper, we investigate the effects of service quality, satisfaction with the service recovery, value, image, and price on airport passenger’s overall satisfaction and loyalty. In particular, we focus on passengers’ perceptions of airport service quality of airports of Puglia.

It is known that satisfaction with the airport experience is influenced by passenger's expectations as well as service delivered, so assessing airport service performance requires understanding of a complete set of passenger experiences covering all activities from departures to arrivals. In particular the research covers the pre-flight passenger travel experience.

To test the relationships between the various aspects of satisfaction, the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), specifically Partial Least Squares-Path Modeling (PLS-PM), is used to analyse the data of the questionnaires filled out by passengers.

The data refer to the years 2015, 2016, 2017, examined twice a year (in summer and in winter); the target population consists of the passengers departing from "Aeroporti di Puglia" (Bari and Brindisi).

The analysis on collected data was carried out by analyzing each indicator provided in the Service Charter. The indicators provided in the Charter of Services are multiple, so they were organized in dimensions: "Security services", "Accuracy and punctuality of services", "Cleaning and Hygiene", "Comfort", "Additional Services", "Information services", "Counter/Gate services", "Transport Network" and "Overall satisfaction".

The goal of this paper is to analyse casual relationships, defined according to a theoretical model linking different dimensions, each measured through a number of observable indicators, to study whether and to what extent these dimensions influence the dimension of passengers' satisfaction and to understand whether some conditions such as the flight period and travel purpose, are statistically significant in determining the impacts of these dimensions on the levels of passenger satisfaction of the airports of Puglia.

Moreover, as airport management needs to know how they could identify some improvement opportunities within airport service area in order to meet or exceed passenger satisfaction with their service performance, PLS-PM provides information on the relative importance of constructs in explaining other constructs in the structural model.

The results show that all the hypothesized relationships are statistically significant (p < 0.05). Airport "transport network" is found to have a significant positive effect on passenger's satisfaction, followed by "Information Services" and "Gate Services".

Statistical tests show that the flight period is statistically significant for "comfort" dimension, while travel purpose is statistically significant for "Comfort", "Information Services" and "Gate Services" dimensions.

The analysis indicates that passengers' expectation of the quality of the services offered at the airports before they could actually experienced them are improved after using these services