Qual Quant DOI 10.1007/s11135-012-9771-7 Passenger satisfaction: a multi-group analysis Laura Antonucci · Corrado Crocetta · Francesco D. d’Ovidio · Ernesto Toma © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012 Abstract To analyse the level of passenger satisfaction of a public local transport service, after an explorative factorial analysis, a Structural Equation Model was adopted. The main goal of this paper is to verify how much some service characteristics could influence the perceived quality of the service. The passengers are found very sensitive to the level of the service organization and to the way the service is delivered (punctuality and regularity, and short waiting time). The safety and reliability of buses, the level of comfort and cleanness and the professionalism and courtesy of staff had, also, a big weight to determinate of the customer satisfaction. Applying a further analysis on different sub-samples, based on indi- vidual characteristics, we found that the model above identified is full invariant for different residence area and frequency of use of the service, and partially invariant for age groups, employment status, time slot of use and reason of use. The test of invariance the structural coefficients failed considering gender or education level of the passengers. Keywords Customer satisfaction · Transport service · Explorative factorial analysis · Structural equations models · Invariance test This paper is a common project of all Authors, but L. Antonucci wrote § 2, C. Crocetta wrote § 1, F.D. d’Ovidio wrote § 3 and E. Toma wrote § 4. L. Antonucci · C. Crocetta (B ) Università degli Studi, Foggia, Italy e-mail: c.crocetta@unifg.it L. Antonucci e-mail: l.antonucci@unifg.it F. D. d’Ovidio · E. Toma Università degli Studi Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy e-mail: fasefd@dss.uniba.it E. Toma e-mail: ernesto.toma@dss.uniba.it 123