مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

A recent study on airport competition, the report commissioned by ACI Europe to Copenhagen Economics (2012), discussed airline switching, that is the ability of an airline to relocate its services, as a factor generating competitive pressure on airports. One key finding was that about 15e20 per cent of routes opened and closed each year on account of airlines redeploying their fleets to maximize profitability. Such airline instability is a threat to an airport’s ability to correctly invest and plan its future developments and may detrimentally affect the economy of the airport’s surrounding areas.

An extreme form of airline instability is de-hubbing, by which the hub carrier abandons the airport. Previous studies have shown that de-hubbing is most often irreversible. The fact that all main hubs nowadays include in their master plans a worst-case dehubbing scenario speaks volumes about the gravity of the perceived risk. Similarly, low-cost carriers (LCCs) can abandon or reduce their presence significantly in airports.

In replies to an Airports Council International (ACI) report, the IATA (2013) remarked that ‘point-to-point’ carriers, primarily LCCs, are responsible for the majority of switching activities, because their business model allows changing airports easily. Compared to de-hubbing, where the relationship between hubs and hub carriers is generally balanced, and in some cases even symbiotic, the market power in switching is markedly on the LCC side.