ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates how airports can use marketing research as a function for linking customers to the marketer: the information obtained helps airports to address marketing issues such as the identification of marketing opportunities, solving of marketing problems, refinement of marketing actions and monitoring of marketing performance. The chapter begins by examining the role of marketing research in general. This leads on to exploring the specific nature of airport marketing research, giving special attention to the route development process (known as air service development in some parts of the world). The rest of the chapter considers the different research methodologies and sources of information available to airports both from secondary and primary research.
