1- Introduction

2- Airport branding and the tourist experience

3- Materials and methods

4- Results and analysis

5- Conclusions

References

Abstract

This study examines the passengers perceptions of Tom Jobim International Airport – RIOgaleão branding strategies and its impact to their experiences in light of the airport branding elements proposed by the literature. To achieve these aims it was conducted a semi-structured interview with the airport’s branding manager and a questionnaire with the passengers (n = 92). The findings showed that the airport’s new management company has been employing tourist branding strategies using a mix of elements, but it is possible that these actions have had the main objective of raising the airport to international service standards, whereby the operation of terminals by large companies is a trend. It was also concluded that some of the airport branding elements (i.e. logos and slogans) are well developed and represent a higher impact on passenger experience, while others (i.e. retail pricing strategies) require further attention and new approaches in order to improve passenger experience in the terminal.

Introduction

Tourism is closely linked to transportation. According to Lamb and Davidson (1996), transportation is one of the three fundamental components of tourism, the other two being the tourism product (supply) and the tourism market (demand, or the tourists themselves). Technological innovations in means of transport have been key to the evolution of tourism, with air transport being perhaps the main contributor to the development of tourism in the world (Lohmann et al., 2013; Lohmann & Panosso Netto, 2012). Because of the growing competition among airports for travelers and cargo, airport managers realize the need to invest in innovative and more focused marketing strategies. One of the differentiation strategies adopted by airports is branding. Although this concept is widely discussed in the airport marketing arena, academic studies of airport branding are still rare. Some noteworthy examples of research in this area are the works of Tse (2009) and Castro (2015). The former, an MBA thesis from the University of Calgary, examined the branding of Canadian airports, while the latter, a doctoral thesis from Rio de Janeiro Federal University, investigated airport branding as a tool to promote tourist destinations. Tom Jobim International Airport – RIOgaleão is the gateway to the city of Rio de Janeiro and one of the main airports in Brazil in terms of passengers handled. In April 2014, the expansion, maintenance and operation of the airport were the subject of a privatization auction, and the winning bidder was Consórcio Aeroportos do Futuro, a consortium formed by the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht and the airport operator Changi Airports International from Singapore, acquiring a 51% stake, while Infraero, the Brazilian government’s airport operating company, retained 49% (RIOgaleão, n.d.). Odebrecht sought to sell its share in 2017 following its implication in a corruption scandal involving the Brazilian government. China’s HNA Infrastructure announced that it had acquired control of the airport management company, but it was unable to obtain the requisite authorization from the Chinese government in a timely manner. Thus, all private participation in the airport was ultimately held by Changi Airports (Rittner, 2017). The new management team adopted a commercial vision with a more diversified outlook, treating passengers as customers rather than mere airport users. Thus, the new airport management strives constantly to identify the needs and expectations of customers so they will have pleasant and memorable experiences (Halpern and Graham, 2013).

1- Introduction

2- Brand attributes and their relevance for the airport industry

3- Methodology: conceptual framework and algorithm

4- Data

5- Empirical results

6- Discussions and conclusion

References

Abstract

The management of social media activities by airports is an emerging issue, and existing empirical literature on the measurement of brand perception in the airport industry is lacking. Usually, the measurement of brand perception is carried out by surveys, which are costly and rapidly become outdated. This study employs a newly developed algorithm to infer brand perceptions by mining the social connections of airports. Twitter accounts of 118 airports in the world are analysed by considering three emerging attributes in the airport industry: environment, disability and luxury. The paper shows how it is possible to identify the current positions of airports in the perception of the customers.

Introduction

Over the last two decades, the airline industry in many countries has moved from a regulated market into a liberalised and business-oriented market in which airports compete for passengers, freight and airlines. In most countries, airports are no longer only a necessary connecting point; instead, they are a source of economic development providing a gateway to cities, states, regions, countries and cultures. In 2014, the economic impact of the aviation industry (direct, indirect, induced and tourism catalytic) on the global gross domestic product (GDP) exceeded $2.7 trillion USD; none of this would be possible without airports (Airports Council International, 2017). Moreover, the deregulation of the air transport market has increased the level of competition among airports to attract passengers and airlines. In this new environment, airport management companies are pursuing strategies focalised to improve customer experience of air travel and tourism. The airport becomes one key element in the consumer process of travel planning, after the initial decision to make the journey. This process, named the travel ecosystem (see Fig. 1), is deeply permeated by digital technologies (World Economic Forum, 2017), given their capacity to attract, gather and communicate information to and from consumers. According to the World Economic Forum (2017), from 2016 to 2025, digitalization in aviation, travel and tourism is expected to generate, along with other effects, benefits valued at $700 billion USD for customers and a wider society through a reduced environmental footprint, improved safety and security, and cost and time savings for consumers. In particular, for customers, the personal impact is expected to be significant as travel becomes a seamless, frictionless, higherquality experience. This new environment has led airport managers to develop new strategies, such as differentiation with branding, to gain a competitive advantage. Competition in the airport industry assumes a complex form, exerting its main effects at three different levels (Graham, 2013): competition among groups of airports, competition among airports and competition inside airports. The second level is related to competition among airports belonging to the same catchment area. This frequently occurs in the major urban areas where there exists more than one airport. When the airports are operated as a group, the result of competition can be controversial. In fact, for airports belonging to the same catchment area, this has led to a mitigation of competition (Forsyth, 2006). However, the advantages that result from working as a group rely, on one hand, on the adoption of a coordinated development strategy, and on the other, on the reduction of costs through the sharing of resources and expertise and the positive effects due to the economies of scale. The latter level of competition concerns the wide range of airport services that can be provided by both the airport operator and an external company.

مقاله سال 2016

When the UK began privatization of its state owned utilities in the 1980s, rate of return regulation (RORR) was the form of price regulation most commonly used in the US for the regulation of privately owned utilities. Instead of US style RORR, the UK government introduced price cap regulation (PCR) for industries with no or limited competition. Proponents of PCR argued that RORR did not incentivize cost efficiency and often led to regulatory capture. PCR was held up as a superior form of price regulation where the regulator could delegate pricing decisions to the firm while providing it with the incentive to reap profit increases from cost reductions and productivity improvements.

Other types of incentive regulation include rate case moratoria, profit sharing, revenue sharing, banded RORR and yardstick regulation (Vogelsang, 2002). PCR became widely adopted as it combined simplicity with incentives for cost reductions and flexibility for price rebalancing (Sappington and Weisman, 2010; Gomez,
2013). PCR was subsequently applied to the UK privatized telecoms, electricity, gas, water, airports and railways sectors. PCR was also adopted by many other countries around the world as privatization of utilities and infrastructure gathered momentum from the 1990s.

PCR for airports was introduced for UK privatized airports in 1986. Since then, airports in several other countries have also been privatized and global airport players are increasingly making their presence felt (Graham, 2008a; Gillen, 2011). Different approaches to price regulation of airports have developed of which PCR is one variant. These approaches include light-handed regulation, price or revenue yield caps, rate of return regulation, earnings sharing, as well as choice of till (Forsyth et al., 2004). In countries where airport privatization is still in the early stages, the spectrum of airports and varied nature of regulatory regimes can be confusing and the lack of a general framework can itself become an obstacle to privatization.

مقاله سال 2016

Civil aviation plays a strategic role in development, either by the transport of people and goods it provides, or by the generation of jobs and financial transactions, particularly in a country of continental size such as Brazil. In alignment with its development plans, Brazil needs to devote efforts to make an airport infrastructure available that is consistent with the circulation of people by air forecast for the next few years, because in addition to the growing domestic circulation, the country will host large-scale international events. For the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, for example, more than 10,500 athletes from around 205 nations, in addition to thousands of press and support professionals and tourists from all over the world are expected.

As a result of these activities, various factors associated with the Brazilian airport infrastructure and issues related to the operational performance of the airports, in addition to the way these are assessed from a passenger’s perspective, began to be the subject of debate. The uncertainty regarding the existing infrastructure’s capacity to meet the demand in a timely manner and according to passenger expectation was put on the agenda. As such, it has become important to identify methodologies that are able to assess the operational performance of Brazilian airports in order to enable the planning of future availability in a way that is consistent with the quality standards in force.

Thus, in order to measure the operational performance of Brazilian airport terminals, the Department of Civil Aviation (Secretaria de Aviaçao Civil ~ – SAC/PR) has been conducting a survey in loco at the main airports to capture general data on passenger perception regarding the established operational performance metrics. This measure represents a support to Brazilian airport management and seeks to guide actions for improvements in the provision of airport services to passengers (SAC/PR, 2014). The research conducted by SAC/PR is consolidated in quarterly reports and presents the operational performance of airports for each indicator through arithmetic means of the passengers’ general assessments. The final result is also only presented using the arithmetic mean of the indicators, i.e. in a compensatory way, without taking into account the allocation of importance (weights) to criteria.

مقاله سال 2016

Increasing demand for air travel in recent years has meant growing numbers of people travelling to and from airports. Worldwide, it is estimated that each year over 3.3 billion passengers travel between the estimated 4000 airports that support scheduled air services (ATAG, 2014). Accommodating current and future demand for air travel will require the sustained provision of safe, efficient, reliable and affordable ground access travel for passengers and other airport users. This can act as a key competitive advantage for airports and their related economies, both in terms of widening the airports’ effective catchment area and the wider benefits afforded by improved connectivity to air travel (Budd et al., 2015). At major airports with very large (even national) catchment areas the scale of ground access travel can be considerable. For example, Coogan et al. (2008) estimates that an airport handling 45 million passengers per year can generate up to 5 million vehicle miles of ground access travel per day (the equivalent of 1,825,000,000 miles per year).

In the UK, as elsewhere, ground access travel continues to be dominated by private vehicle trips. At the UK’s two largest airports, Heathrow (73.1 million annual passengers) and Gatwick (37.9 million annual passengers), private vehicles represent 58.6% and 58.3% of the mode share, respectively (CAA, 2015). At smaller regional airports private vehicle mode shares are generally even higher, such is the case at Luton (70.9% private vehicle), Manchester (83.5% private vehicle) and Birmingham (76.5% private vehicle) (CAA, 2015). Given that these trips are necessarily generated to/ from a single site the implications in terms of traffic delays and congestion, as well as local air quality and human health, are profound (Budd et al., 2011a).

Many passengers travelling to/from airports will be accompanied by friends or relatives, who wish to either wave the passenger farewell or greet them on their arrival. At some airports the number of these ‘meeter-greeters’ can be significant. It has been suggested that this may be especially the case at airports that handle higher shares of international leisure passengers than those with a stronger focus on business traffic (LeighFisher et al., 2010). This ismost likely a reflection of the differing trip characteristics of these journey types, namely that leisure passengers may be staying away for longer, travelling with luggage, and are unlikely to have their travel paid for (which will generally be the case for business passengers). The residence status of the passenger may also play a role in this, given that residents of a region are likely to have greater access to their network of friends and relatives (i.e. potential ‘meeter-greeters’) than passengers who are non-residents of a region. While potentially significant in scale and scope, the role of ‘meeter-greeters’ in a ground access context has not been widely examined or reported in the research.

مقاله سال 2016

Forsyth (2006, p. 73) contends that the links between aviation and tourism are becoming recognized more explicitly and that these exert a considerable influence on the role of governments’ aviation policies. This is particularly relevant to some islands within the European Union (EU), where bilateral agreements outside the EU unequivocally affect the nationalities of tourists that can be targeted in promotional activities by destination marketing organizations. Most of the islands in the EU do not have country sovereignty rights to negotiate aviation bilateral agreements freely and thus tourism development can be highly constrained. In islands, for obvious reasons, tourism development depends to a great extent on airport infrastructures and tourism policy makers and airport managers are very conscious that to be competitive in tourism, aeronautical fares need to be low. The airline industry has exerted some pressure on airports to control the level of aeronautical charges, so airports have been obliged to find new ways of obtaining revenues through the development of new and more sophisticated commercial activities, with shopping and restaurant services being among the most important ones also in terms of their ability to affect airport operations (Rhoades et al., 2000).

Graham (2009) argues that there are some similarities and differences between high street and airport retailing that need to be analysed. Customers at airports tend to be more price-inelastic than high street customers because they are usually a captive market and belong to a high socio-economic group. The stress and shock customers experience at airports are not comparable. Another important difference is based on the primary function of airports as a modal interchange within the transport system that should not be compromised by the development of commercial activities. It is well known that many global brands with a good reputation operate in many of the airports around the world, e.g. Starbucks and McDonald’s. However, airports have recently started to introduce a new revolutionary strategy, opening up to new localbrands that are changing the uniformity observed in the past. Assies (2014) analyses these strategies in some European airports and finds that they are increasingly giving more relevance to local brands as a way of fulfilling the needs of consumers by providing an experience that reflects a sense of community and place.

Over the past few decades, globalization has played a major role in modifying habits of eating out (Warde and Martens, 2000). Eating out is an activity that has more than economic implications as it is influenced by consumers’ social and cultural backgrounds and has become an important habit in the modern way of life. This trend is also relevant to companies managing food and beverage (F&B) services in airport areas, where eating and drinking has to be considered an important part of tourists’ experience and thus can enhance or damage the tourist destination image. Every year, more than 900 million people, including businessmen, commuters, tradesmen, occasional travellers and tourists, use airports around the world. In 2010, non-aeronautical revenues worldwide made up 46.5% of industry revenue. Specifically, they accounted for USD 35 billion, with F&B having a market value of USD 10 billion (The Foodie Report, 2011), thus generating higher profit margins than aeronautical activities (ACI, 2012). It is estimated that the number of airport passengers may reach 7.3 billion by the year 2017, thus determining a significant increase in the F&B sector, which may be worth up to USD 18 billion in seven years’ time (The Foodie Report, 2011). According to ACI (FAB, 2011), this market may even double in size by 2027, reaching up to 11 billion passengers with an annual revenue of USD 35 billion.

مقاله سال 2016

As traffic volume rises, airports struggle to optimize infrastructure while adopting a customer-oriented focus to achieve better performance (Fodness and Murray, 2007; Halpern and Graham, 2013). Also, non-aeronautical revenues have become critical for airport sustainability, which leads to increasing concerns with the marketing of retail areas within airport terminals (Gillen, 2011). Therefore, the relevance of understanding passenger perceptions of airport service quality (ASQ) is paramount.

ptions of airport service quality (ASQ) is paramount. Within the airport industry, service quality measures based on passenger perception have typically been used for operational performance measurement and benchmarking purposes. Moreover, regulators and governments habitually use service quality monitoring to assure that the interests of airport users are not being compromised (Francis et al., 2002). With the growing interest in the subject, ASQ surveys have been systematically carried out by international agencies, regulatory authorities, airport operators, and other organizations (ACI, 2014; Fodness and Murray, 2007; IATA, 2015; Kramer et al., 2013; Zidarova and Zografos, 2011).

More recently, some approaches and methods usually applied within other industries appear to have gained momentum. For instance, analysis of passenger expectations regarding the airport service and using a structural equation modeling approach to the complex relationships between passenger attitudes and ASQ (Bogicevic et al., 2013; Fodness and Murray, 2007; Jeon and Kim, 2012; Nesset and Helgesen, 2014; Park and Jung, 2011). It seems that there is increasing interest in understanding ASQ multidimensionality and the multifaceted nature of the passengereairport interaction.

مقاله سال 2016

Demand at an airport is rarely distributed evenly throughout the year, month and/or day. It is typically characterized by (more or less pronounced) hourly, daily and/or monthly variations. (Ashford et al., 1997). Monthly variations are typically used to determine the extent to which an airport experiences seasonal concentrations. Seasonality arises from an increase in demand, usually connected to vacation seasons (summer or winter). It may also be imposed by events related to important holidays that may differ depending on the country, region, religion, etc. (Halpern, 2011).

Eurocontrol (2007) identified 39 European seasonal airports using the traffic from 2006 as a reference. Excepting “regular” seasonal airports where seasonality is driven by the tourist season (summer or winter) among these 39, there are six airports that experienced seasonality due to special events in 2006.

Fig. 1 shows seasonal character of seven AENA airports.1 The distribution of annual departures by month for year 2011 is given in the chart (source: AENA Estadisticas, 2011). There is a clear difference between high season (usually from 4th/5th to 9th/10th month of the year) and off-season traffic. Depending on the airport, the difference can be smaller (Alicante and Malaga) or bigger (Palma de Mallorca, Murcia and Reus), or even very extreme in high season, resulting in sharp peaks (Ibiza and Menorca).

مقاله سال 2016

Changes in the modern air transport business have increasingly transformed the role of airports and their perception by travellers and consumers. The joint interaction of factors such as the expansion of low-cost carriers (LCC), raising competition between airlines, increasing ease in purchasing tickets, changes in travelling habits, privatization of infrastructure, have modified the business worldwide (Papatheodorou and Lei, 2006; Graham, 2009; CastilloManzano, 2010). As a consequence, the search for revenues maximisation has gradually shifted its main focus from traditional core aeronautical service to non-aviation or commercial sources (Edwards, 2005; Morrison, 2009). In fact, the strong interrelationships between tourism and shopping have convinced airport managers to expand their view of airports from serving the sole transportation of passengers to leisure attraction (Freathy & O’Connell, 1999; Geuens et al., 2004). Today airports provide a wide variety of entertaining services to travellers, besides having expanded traditional shopping-related ones.

Such revolution has been relatively recent. Indeed, airport managers have dealt with non-aviation activities as important assets for their decisions for six decades (Castillo-Manzano, 2010). However, only since 1980s airports began to transform from central or local government organizations to enterprises capable of generating substantial profits (Kim and Shin, 2001). Starting from about a decade later, non-aviation sources of revenues have considerably grown (Francis et al., 2004; Graham, 2009; Morrison, 2009; Fasone and Maggiore, 2012), to the point that such parallel business has become crucial for many airports, sometimes showing a more rapid rise than passengers traffic (Doganis, 2006; Brechin, 1999; Kim and Shin, 2001; Torres et al., 2005; Fasone and Scuderi, 2012). Such timing goes parallel with the evolution of tourism since the Eighties, from mass phenomenon to larger and highly segmented market (Aguilo Perez and Juaneda Sampol, 2000;
Brida and Scuderi, 2013), whose growth and economic effect has put pressure to policymakers in building infrastructures such as roads, airports and harbours (Mak, 2004; Van Vijk and Persoon, 2006).

All this justifies the growing interest towards the assessment of the elements that likely influence commercial or non-aviation revenues (NAR), although the topic has still remained under investigated (Geuens et al., 2004; Castillo-Manzano, 2010). Consistently, different contributors have tried to explain the main factors influencing these important sources for profits. The topic iscomplex, inasmuch as various factors such as passengers characteristics, structure of airport, supply of retail shops and their positioning at the airport, contingent factors as flight delays may cause travellers to spend (Graham, 2008; Castillo-Manzano, 2010). Within the literature, only a limited number of works applied regression models in order to assess the determinants of spending. A subset of them used a demand-based approach and gathered data from direct interviews to passengers. Others adopted a supply-side perspective through airport-level information. Of course, both have provided useful though different indications to managers. The former approach has been usually limited to a single structure e with the exception of Castillo-Manzano (2010) e and it can potentially survey a considerable number of variables that provide highly detailed information on passengers. The latter exploits data from different structures and can be suitable to find significant regularities in the way structures are managed. The present contribution adopts the second approach. We try to learn lessons for management practice from data coming from a set of airports. In a sense, we follow Graham’s (2009) and Papatheodorou and Lei’s (2006) invitation to test new models for explaining the determinants of airport revenues. It is based on a longitudinal dataset of German airports. However, unlike similar previous studies we extend the set of control variables in order to test the simultaneous significance of different regressors and provide a more complete overview of the topic.

مقاله سال 2016

Brazil has recently joined the group of countries that have large airports operated by private companies. In 2011, the greenfield project of the International Airport of Sao Gonçalo do Amarante, in ~ the metropolitan region of Natal (Rio Grande do Norte), was awarded to a private company. In 2012, three different private consortiums won the concession contracts for the International Airports of Viracopos (VCP, at Campinas, S~ ao Paulo), Governador Andre Franco Montoro (GRU, at Guarulhos, S
ao Paulo) and Brasilia – ~ Presidente Juscelino Kubitschek (BSB, in the Federal District). Finally, in 2013, the Brazilian government granted to private parties the International Airport of Rio de Janeiro/Galeao – Antonio Carlos Jobim (GIG) and Tancredo Neves International Airport (CFN, located in the metropolitan area of Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais).

The recent Brazilian experience contained a noteworthy particularity: bidding rules were specifically designed to prevent cross-ownership among different airport operators. In the first round of biddings (in 2012), no single private entity could be awarded more than one airport concession. Moreover, the bidding rules of the second round (in 2013) provided that corporate groups responsible for operating one of the airports granted in the first round could not hold more than a 15% stake at a consortium bidding for an airport in the second round.2

These restrictions were designed to foster more intense competition among different airports, especially in thedevelopment of national and international hubs. During the preparation of the invitation to tender (ITT), there was intense discussion among government agencies and interested bidders on the scope and effects of such restrictions. Many argued that they would lower the competitiveness of the tenders by limiting the number of bidders. Ultimately, cross-ownership restrictions were adopted, and not only were the value of the awards significant, but the tenders attracted some of the world’s most prominent airport operators.

مقاله سال 2016

These days many people would agree that airports should invest in enhanced facilities and higher levels of service quality in order to attract passengers, thereby generating significantly higher nonaeronautical revenue, which is critical to airport profitability. Merkert and Assaf (2015) even argue that service quality is a significant performance indicator to an airport and should be treated with the same level of importance as profitability.

The issue of airport service quality has been widely examined in airport literature. For example, Yeh and Kuo (2003) evaluated the service quality of fourteen major Asia-Pacific international airports using a fuzzy multi-attribute decision making approach. Arif et al. (2013) assessed customer satisfaction at the United Arab Emirates’ three airports. Transfer passengers’ experiences at Bandaranaike International Airport in Sri Lanka were studied by De Barros et al. (2007). In Australia, Melbourne Airport was once ranked within the top 5 airports that handled 15e25 million passengers according to the Airport Quality Service Survey conducted by Airports Council International (ACI) in 2008, but not any longer since then. In 2011 it did not even make the top 100 according to ACI’s rankings. The ACCC (2015) has found that service quality at all the monitored Australian airports has declined in the last decade in part due to the fact that customers’ expectations are constantly changing, and Melbourne airport received the lowest quality of service rating amongst Australian airports in the last few years. This research selects Melbourne airport as a case study in order to reexamine the service quality issue using both expectation and perception data to identify areas requiring focus and investment of resources, so as to deliver satisfactory services that fulfil the needs and expectations of airport passengers.

مقاله سال 2016

The challenges associated with maintaining a secure air travel system are increasing in scope and importance. Due to a sustained business globalization, turbulent regional crises, the current security threats, and an expansion of air travel services to unprecedented levels, today’s traveler flows are increasing (International Air Transport Association, 2016). Specifically, the proliferation of low cost air carriers and a clearer differentiation between the core and ancillary services offered by legacy carriers, the emergence of shared economy lodging/ground transportation business models at global scale (e.g., Airbnb, Uber), and the development of newer leisure destinations resulted in unprecedented leisure travel volumes. Moreover, the contemporary global business cycles and the development of attractive frequent traveler reward programs are creating new dynamics within business travel. In this context, the security organizations must allocate a limited amount of resources to safeguard the security of the increasingly interconnected global travel system and fend off threats (Wong and Brooks, 2015). Biometric systems play a critical role in this complex system of hardware, software, and business/administrative models, due to their ability to uniquely ascertain travelers’ identity (Morosan, 2011).

Characterized by higher accuracy relative to rival systems (Jain et al., 2011), biometric systems have been successfully deployed in a variety of air travel and related border control settings (Farrell, 2016). Importantly, the accuracy of biometric systems relative to rival systems facilitated the development of biometric-based trusted traveler programs, which increased the efficiency of air travel and border control traveler processing (e.g., Global Entry, Nexus, Sentri, TSA PreCheck). The success of such programs is predicated upon: (1) the opportunity to redeploy resources to screen travelers with unknown backgrounds (i.e., higher risk) and thus realize substantial resource savings (Kosner, 2014), and (2) the benefits (e.g., convenience, processing speed) offered to enrolled (i.e., trusted) travelers (Morosan, 2012). The tremendous recent progress made in the development of biometric systems and the travelers’ seeming acceptance of self-service technology facilitated the transcendence of legacy biometric systems into newer systems. Among those, biometric electronic gates (thereafter called “egates”) represent one of the latest solutions for automatic air traveler processing when entering national territories, accessing secure areas, and boarding commercial flights (Caldwell, 2015).

E-gates are biometric systems based on single- or multimodality biometric (e.g., face, fingerprint) and biographic (e.g., travel documents) information verification (Gohringer, 2015). Most e-gates have been deployed in border control settings, in airports in Europe and Asia, and the number of airports deploying e-gates is increasing (n.a., 2014). As the e-gate technology develops, the tasks addressed by e-gates are evolving as well. For example, adhering to contemporary newer “fast travel” initiatives, e-gates are currentlybeing tested at Bengalore airport in India to ascertain if they can extend the task environment from predominantly border control to streamline traveler processing in domestic travel (Bengaluru Airport, 2015). While collaboration among critical stakeholders (e.g., airports, airlines, government security agencies) is necessary, e-gates could improve the end-to-end experience of travelers and the security of the overall travel system by including multiple tasks within the same travel experience, such as check-in, luggage services, or boarding (Farrell, 2016).

مقاله سال 2016

The role airports play in the flow and development of cargo traffic from location to location cannot be overemphasised. Cargo agents, shippers and airlines alike are so conscious of this that efforts are put in place individually to ensure business is transacted with utmost efficiency at airports. Air cargo transportation is designed as a system to provide fast and efficient delivery of goods. Air transport as the fastest mode of transport is used to safely carry high-valued and time-critical goods. It is necessary to note that air cargo has its own rules, and need to be studied separately from passenger transport as airports need to develop separate strategies concerning air cargo to make them more competitive in the market (Kupfer et al., 2012). Developments in the overall air transport operations lay importance to cargo operations at airports alongside passenger handling by the airlines. To show the importance of cargo operations by passenger airlines, Kupfer et al. (2012) stated that about half of air cargo is still transported in the belly space of passenger aircraft or in combi-aircraft and is therefore partly influenced by passenger transport, and that there are very important differences between air freight transported in all-cargo aircraft and in passenger aircraft. The view of Woodrow (2012) emphasised the growing percentage of cargo that will have to be transported in passenger bellies of most modern Airbus and Boeing twin-engine aircrafts; while smaller freighter operators are likely to increasingly focus on optimising their belly space for cargo operations. The study of Merkert and Ploix (2014) further established the influence of passenger terminal reorganisation on belly-hold freight operations at airports.

Airports as terminal points in the transport system compete for traffic in multi-airport country such as Nigeria. Ohashi et al. (2005) detailed out airport choice factors for cargo transshipment in the North/East Asia region. The choice arises basically as a result of competition among airports. This possibly will make cargo agents prefer routing operations in one airport at the expense of the other even when the other airport is not close to the final destination of the cargo. Nevertheless, the ability of an airport to attract cargo routing by agents where there are alternative airports to satisfy their cargo delivery purpose needs to be studied extensively. The competition for cargo traffic handling and its connection to the airport choice of cargo agents operations is the focus of this study. The study of Gardiner (2006) found the location and presence of freight forwarders (cargo agents) as part of airport characteristics identified to be attracting cargo airlines to an airport. This underscores the importance of cargo agents operations at any airport. To this end, this study is an effort to find out why cargo agents prefer to operate at an airport at the expense of the other withcompetitive traffic demand.

The paper is structured such that Section 1 handles the introduction; Section 2 is a focus on literature, while Section 3 described the study area; Section 4 gives the details of data and methods adopted for the study while Section 5 deals with the presentation of results and discussion; and Section 6 presents the policy recommendation and conclusion.