Airport strategies in a competitive environment

Abstract

The liberalisation of the air transport market has introduced new dynamics in the airportindustry, greatly increasing its complexity. In recent decades, airports have evolved frominfrastructure providers in a monopolistic context, to commercially-orientated enterprises in acompetitive environment. Existing research on airport competition is usually focused ontraffic leakage from neighbouring airports for origin-destination markets, or between largehubs for transfers. However, the existence of competition between airports, in the differentways presented in this work, has created a change of paradigm and sufficient evidence forabandoning the idea of airports as monopolies.This work aims at proposing an integrated framework for the analysis of the airport industryin which an airport is seen as a multi-service firm that interacts with a network ofstakeholders - the airport business network - to deliver several service packages to differentgroups of customers.We present three novel contributions for the analysis of the global airport industry: a newdefinition of customer groups for the airport, viewed as a multi- service firm; the airportbusiness network, a model to examine the interactions between the agents involved in theairport business to produce the airport service packages; and an identification ofdifferentiation factors that airport managers may combine to produce competitive strategies.We also propose the integration of these elements, in order to provide a common frameworkto support the analysis of the current competitive environment within the industry.