Article’s

The aviation industry has transformed into a highly competitive, service-oriented sector where passenger satisfaction serves as a vital indicator of operational excellence and financial viability.1 Beyond reputation, satisfaction directly drives commercial performance; industry data suggests a 1% improvement in global passenger satisfaction correlates with a 1.5% increase in non-aeronautical revenue.1 This study investigates the determinants of satisfaction across sixteen Airports Authority of India (AAI) airports using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) based on 2025 Airport Service Quality (ASQ) Departure Survey data.1 The ASQ program, developed and administered by the Airports Council International (ACI), is a globally recognized passenger service benchmarking tool that provides standardized measures of passenger satisfaction directly at the day of service.1 The survey evaluates 31 specific service parameters alongside one overall affect, representing Overall Satisfaction.1 Initial structural iterations revealed severe multicollinearity among primary customer contact points, inducing suppression effects and theoretically inconsistent negative path coefficients. To resolve this, a reflective-reflective hierarchical component model (HCM) is proposed as a theoretical solution. The empirical structural model evaluated using 2025 data successfully explains 65.1% of the variance in overall passenger satisfaction (R² = 0.651). The analysis identifies Security Screening (SS) (β = 0.911, p < 0.001) and Throughout the Airport (TTA) (β = 0.678, p < 0.001) as the primary positive drivers of satisfaction, while highlighting severe multicollinearity and suppression effects resulting in negative path coefficients for Check-In (β = –0.588), Shopping/Dining (β = –0.719), and Ease of Access (β = –0.360). These findings offer an empirically validated roadmap for airport managers to prioritize digital infrastructure and streamline terminal processing to maximize non-aeronautical revenue.