Introduction

Selected Articles from the ATRS Conference, Porto, and the WCTR Conference, Lisbon, 2010

Performance in Deregulated and Liberalized Air Transport

The Air Transport Research Society (ATRS) World Conference took place in Porto, Portugal, in June and the twelfth World Conference on Transport Research Society (WCTR) was held in Lisbon from July 11 to 15, 2010. In this fourteenth year of the ATRS Conference 319 participants attended and 247 papers were presented, while the Aviation and Airport Track sessions in the WCTR (Topic A1) had 69 presentations.

The ATRS, a special-interest group of the WCTR, attracts researchers, policymakers, executives, and practitioners from around the world to share research issues, methodologies, and results; to enhance research capability on multinational and multidisciplinary air-transport issues; and to find solutions to current and anticipated future challenges.

Four papers have been chosen for this special issue of the Transportation Journal, based on the results of a double-blind review process. The unifying theme of the issue is performance in deregulated or liberalized air transport. Although these terms differ, they are often used interchangeably in various contexts. Full deregulation of air transport first took place in the United States in 1978, followed by a phased-in liberalization-deregulation approach implemented in the European Union between 1988 and 1997. Over the last twenty-five years, this trend has continued in the international arena, with many "open skies" bilateral and multilateral agreements signed. The deregulation process has also found strong proponents in Oceania, Latin America, and Asia. Soon it was realized that peripheral air-transport services could be a source of market distortion and gradually airport and air-navigation services have been liberalized as well. As expected, the removal of impediments in the market had important effects on competition, pricing strategies, commercialization, and productivity. While all these changes occur, safety has been more heavily scrutinized and regulated. It is in this background that we introduce four papers dealing with several important aspects of air transport performance. The first analyzes airline competition dynamics, the next two cover airport performance, and the last—and not the least—covers human error in air-traffic control.

In the opening article of this special issue Cho, Windle, and Hofer apply industrial economics concepts to analyze route competition in US multi-airport cities. They show that airline pricing strategies can become complicated in the context of multinodal networks involving focal and adjacent airport pairs. Their research underlines that airport location, congestion, and a carrier's business model are all important dimensions in a carrier's competitive strategy. Their research also addresses implications for airline and airport managers as well as policymakers promoting competition in the air-transport market. Having the above in mind, the article sheds new light on airline competition by focusing on the complex airline-airport nexus currently prevailing in the American market.

In the second article, using economic analysis, Volkova and Müller evaluate the commercial (nonaeronautical) performance of a group of US airports. This topic is important given the global trend for airport commercialization. First they show that food and beverage services, and parking and car rental services are two major sources of nonaeronautical revenue for US airports. Then they identify the buying behavior of different passenger types and highlight differences observed between airport terminals dedicated to full-service carriers and those serving primarily low-cost carriers. In this context, the article validly contributes to the on-going academic and practitioner discussion on the importance of market segmentation not only across but also within airports.

In the third article of this issue Lai, Potter, and Beynon analyze benchmarking techniques used to assess airport performance. They undertake a thorough literature review covering the last twenty years to highlight the various methodologies and modeling tools used to evaluate comparative efficiency and productivity in the airport sector. They highlight that although airport size and governance have received much space in studies on performance, their actual effect remains largely inconclusive. To advance further on this question, the article proposes to blend quantitative...