| De-Hubbing cases and recovery patterns |
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In this paper Redondi, Malighetti and Paleari analyze the cases of de-hubbing during period 1997-2009 in the world-wide air transport network, concluding that de-hubbing is not likely to be reversible.
Abstract The objective of this work is to analyze To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to study dehubbing in a systematic way. In order to identify those cases, this paper firstly addresses the issue of which quantitative conditions must be met for airports to be identified as de-hubbing cases. These conditions include the declining presence of the hub carrier, or hub alliance, within the airport, that results in a decrease in the number and quality of connections offered. The second phase is to study what happens after de-hubbing by clustering the cases into homogenous scenarios. Our results show that, on average, airports that suffered de-hubbing did not recover their original traffic in 5 years. Results suggest that de-hubbing is not likely to be reversible. When hub carriers are replaced at least partially by low-cost carriers, the airports on average show faster recovery trends. In other cases, the airport becomes “satellite” of different alliances which compete to each other for feeding passengers towards their main hubs. The most frequent case is when, after de-hubbing, the airports traffic declines. |