Customer Experience at Tribhuvan International Airport, Nepal

Tribhuvan International Airport (TIA) is the only international airport in Nepal. As a part of the service industry, TIA has as its main focus customer satisfaction, which can be described as the overall evaluation of customer experience about the product or the offered service as per their expectations. The main objective and goal of this research was to determine the level of customer satisfaction at Tribhuvan International Airport. An annual survey of travelers conducted by a press media “Sleeping in Airport” who had used Airport services found that TIA was considered to be one of the 10 worst airports in the world in this area. It was important to find out the reasons for this as customer satisfaction is a key area of concern for airports. This purpose of the current research was to determine customer satisfaction levels at Tribhuvan International Airport, identify the problems in the service provided, and elaborate ways to improve service quality so that the gap between customer expectation and their experience will be reduced. In the research, qualitative and quantitative methods were used. For the qualitative information, an email interview with employees of TIA was carried out. Quantitative research was done in the form of a questionnaire that was distributed online who had used TIA a Google survey, with a sufficient number of responses received. An analysis of the data provided a clear picture of the problems regarding customer satisfaction. This suggested that for better customer experience at TIA the airport has to make improvements in the areas of hygiene, security, and comfort. The suggestions given by the respondents in the survey via the questionnaires were also considered in the recommendations to ensure that the research takes account of the real experiences of cus-tomers and any problems regarding customer experience at TIA. The results of this research will be useful also in other fields of marketing and management related to customer satisfaction