Edinburgh Napier University

  Airports play a significant role in globalization, connecting cities and countries. According to Clarkson (2015), the 20 busiest airports in the world moved more than 700 million passengers in year 2014. By 2020, it’s estimated that aviation will contribute $53 billion to the country’s economy, representing 37.5 per cent of the GDP and supporting 750,000 jobs (www.dcaa.gov.ae). In short, having a huge financial and economic impact, airports are gateways to destinations. If airports work, it becomes easy and pleasurable to visit the destinations. And when it doesn’t… visitors do not come back. Although focus on new technologies and customer experience has revolutionized air travel during the past decade, passenger satisfaction with airports continues to lag behind that of other aspects of the travel industry (Ali, Kim & Ryu, 2016). In a report published by SKYTRAX, the top reasons for passenger dissatisfaction at airports include service failures related to the physical and social environment of the airports.Primarily, marketing research is based on the assumption that customers behave in a normative and functional manner during service exchange. This view contrasts with a growing body of practitioner- and theory-based literature that shows customers’ routine activities in an alternate light. Here, consumers are presented as not only the source of their own dissatisfaction and consequent service failures, but also as the perpetrators of aggressive, rude, illegitimate, and illegal misdeeds (Zourrig et al., 2009). Alarmingly, such customer misbehaviours are documented as occurring on an increasingly frequent basis, often resulting in grave consequences for employees, fellow customers, and organisations (Ro, 2015). However, little research has examined how contextual factors such as physical and social environment may result in misbehaviour performed within these environments. The current study intends to contribute to the literature by examining the relationships among customers’ perceptions of physical and social environment, customer disaffection and customer misbehaviour.