Anne Graham

Airport benchmarking: a review of the current situation

Purpose – To provide an overview of the current attitudes and practical experience of airport benchmarking.Design/methodology/approach – A range of benchmarking studies are critiqued. The paper considers the partial performance measures which are used from an economic, operational and environmental perspective. It also investigates more complex modelling approaches which have been undertaken to gain greater insight into an airports overall performance. In addition an assessment is made of the role of benchmarking in airport regulation.Findings – The paper finds that benchmarking techniques have become well established in recent years within the airport sector. However there is still some way to go in overcoming some of the problems that inhibit effective benchmarking on a truly international basis.Research limitations/implications – The paper focuses on methodological issues and does not discuss the findings of research in this area.Practical implications – A very useful source of information for all res...

Demand for leisure air travel and limits to growth

This paper discusses methodologies for analysing the existence of limits to growth of leisure air travel and defines the concept of demand maturity. It considers the air market as one of a number of inter-related travel markets and applies these concepts to a UK case study. The paper concludes that the UK air international leisure travel market is only at the early stages of maturity; whilst the overall leisure travel market seems to be much nearer to full maturity. This means that if UK air travel is still to experience healthy growth rates, it must be at the expense of the growth of some other UK travel market.

The objectives and outcomes of airport privatisation

Abstract Airport privatisation is a controversial yet growing trend that has been accompanied by an expanding quantity of related research. However there has been very little attempt to synthesise this research and identify overarching findings that single studies do not produce. Hence it is the aim here to apply a systematic review of all the results in the academic literature. Both the objectives and outcomes of privatisation are considered although the literature appears surprisingly lacking in assessing whether these are closely aligned. A need for improvements in efficiency, coupled with a requirement for greater investment, appear to be the key drivers of privatisation but the evidence, as to whether there are actually performance benefits, is inconclusive. Improvements need to be made to the methods used, but given that the range of airport privatisation models has now become so diverse, more focus on governance and institutional structures may also yield useful conclusions.

An Airport Experience Framework from a Tourism Perspective

Abstract This study, by integrating the perspectives of sociological, psychological, and service marketing and management, all of which affect the passenger experience, proposes a theoretical framework for the creation of the airport experience in relation to tourism. This research responds to the current phenomenon in which airports are offering other types of experiences within the airport terminal, expanding the role of an airport from being a utility for transportation into a place where various and different values can be offered. This research explores the current airport experience and adds to research on airport experience by clarifying ten key components necessary for airport passenger experience propositions based on existing research, the current industry phenomena, and the empirical study. The paper also underlines those components that can enhance passenger experience in relation to tourism and highlights the role that airports contribute to a destination.

The economic value of additional airport departure capacity

This article presents a model for the economic value of extra capacity at an airport. The model is based on a series of functional relationships linking the benefits of extra capacity and the associated costs. It takes into account the cost of delay for airlines and its indirect consequences on the airport, through the loss or gain of aeronautical and non-aeronautical revenues. The model is highly data-driven and to this end a number of data sources have been used. In particular, special care has been used to take into account the full distribution of delay at the airports rather than its average only. The results with the simple version of the model show the existence of a unique maximum for the operating profit of the airport in terms of capacity. The position of this maximum is clearly dependent on the airport and also has an interesting behaviour with the average number of passenger per aircraft at the airport and the predictability of the flight departure times. In addition, we also show that there exists an important trade-off between an increased predictability and the punctuality at the airport. Finally, it is shown that a more complex behavioural model for passengers can introduce several local maxima in the airport profit and thus drive the airport towards suboptimal decisions.