Airport business excellence: a holistic approach to performance management

Abstract

Aviation business is a primary impetus for the global economy and airports pose a central position in the aviation system. Air transport restructuring of the last three decades has increased the demand for performance improvement in all nodes of the air transport pipeline. Nevertheless, airports are still treated more like infrastructures rather than enterprises, with their efficiency almost exclusively measured in operational and financial terms.The current study is the first known attempt to deal with airport performance in a holistic manner. We approach airports as integrated business ecosystems and we borrow concepts from ecology science to explore their interacting components. We first investigate airports biotic factors, i.e. all living airport participants and their relations. To do so, we develop a novel Airport Business Excellence Model (ABEM) which assesses airport performance using twelve groups of criteria: Leadership, Strategy, HRM, Suppliers and Resources, Partners and Customers, Processes, Products and Services, People results, Operational results, Quality results, Customer results, Society results and Financial results. ABEM was applied to a pluralistic sample of 143 airports in 92 states all over the world. The total performance score derived from ABEM application was subsequently associated with abiotic determinants of the external environment, in order to draw the overall picture of Airport Ecosystem Performance.The study results indicate that airport biotic factors weave a complex nexus of interactions, with Leadership and Strategy displaying the broader impact. Rather surprisingly, Financial results were not considered of primary importance contrary to the People and Operational results that were estimated as more crucial to achieving airport excellence. Regarding the environmental abiotic factors, our findings further support and extend the existing literature, concluding that low seasonality (50-60%), a big airport size between 60 and 80 million WLUs and a combination of Light-handed/monitoring with Dual Till regulation scheme have a positive contribution to the airport performance. On the contrary, hosting no airlines as home base, having a mixed ownership/public management or public ownership/private management, the absence of any Performance Management System and the combination of public ownership with RoR regulatory framework have a negative influence.Finally, we studied the joint impact of the biotic and abiotic performance determinants, finding that the contribution of the software factors is more significant than the effect of the business surroundings to the overall performance of the airport ecosystem.

Η Διατριβή πραγματεύεται το θέμα της διαχείρισης απόδοσης των αεροδρομίων δημιουργώντας κι εφαρμόζοντας σε παγκόσμια κλίμακα το Airport Business Excellence Model (ABEM). Το μοντέλο εξετάζει ένα πλήθος βιοτικών και αβιοτικών παραγόντων και τις αλληλεπιδράσεις τους, στο πλαίσιο της ολιστικής διαχείρισης της απόδοσης του airport ecosystem.