Factors Influencing the Use of Mattala International Airport, as a Domestic Transportation Mode: From Passengers’ Perspective.

This dissertation aims to find the factors influencing the use of Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport, Sri Lanka as a domestic transportation mode from passengers’ perspective.  The information revealed by this research is mainly important for the Airport operator; Airport and Aviation (SL) Ltd, and for any airline. Further it is important to local and foreign leisure travelers as well as for the people in the southern part of the country. Furthermore as the net impact effects on the Sri Lankan economy as a whole this is important to the general public at large.

Usage of Mattala Rajapaksa International airport is very low as the international schedule flight operations has totally ceased at present and this has inevitable results in reduction of domestic air transportation as well. The airport has invested huge amount of money to construct and paying loan installments and further incurring a lot as maintaining cost, but the usage of the airport is far below the expectations and unable to cover operating costs and experiencing huge losses.  Therefore the low usage of Mattala Airport which leads huge losses demands a research study to identify factors and remedial actions.

A conceptual model is developed by conducting extensive research and a questionnaires is designed and pre tested.Entire Sri Lanka’s population is selected as the population for the study and the sample size is selected as 384 and convenient sampling technique is used to collect data. Research findings revealed that the usage of Mattala airport is having a  very strong negative relationship with ‘Cost of Domestic and Scenic flights’, weak positive relationship with ‘Surrounding Facilities’, weak negative relationship with ‘Ground Access Time’ and with ‘Ground Access Cost’. Further the group effect of the model representation towards the usage of Mattala airport is 49.1%. It is mainly recommended to introduce domestic air travel service in between Bandaranaike International Airport and Mattala Airport as schedule flights through A320 or any other similar type of aircraft at a discounted rate of air fee and  also to introduce scenic flights at  discounted rates and further to improve the surrounding facilities. Furthermore it is recommended to provide airport shuttle service for selected few main destinations.