Abstract Evaluating air transport service quality performance is of crucial importance both for countries’ economic development and airline industry, which has a vital role in countries’ development and competitiveness. The multicultural nature of this industry requires strong effort to offer services with good levels of quality. Airport facilities and services are the first experiences that a passenger receives upon arrival. Therefore, measuring the levels of airport services by evaluating passengers’ satisfaction with them is essential to understand the needs of customers. In this work, we want to propose a tool for measuring airport service quality starting from the judgements expressed by passengers about some service aspects. The data supporting the work refer to the services offered by the Lamezia Terme airport, the most important airport of Calabria, in the South of Italy. The data were collected through face-to-face interviews addressed to departing passengers. Passengers expressed their perceptions according to an ordinal verbal scale about some service factors concerning aspects such as information, security, cleanliness and comfort. We propose an ordered logit model with the aim to investigate on the influence of the various service factors on the overall service quality, by considering passengers’ satisfaction with the service factors and the overall service. Specifically, the model can be adopted for identifying the combinations of the satisfaction levels of the service factors that return the level of overall satisfaction desired by the operator. We propose some models for different groups of users in order to verify the differences in perceptions of service quality.