No abstract

Purpose: The main goal of this study is to exact an optimal forecasting method by answering the research question: which is the best model for capturing short-term seasonal components of passenger traffic in Greek coastal shipping? Design/methodology/approach: There are not a lot of scientific efforts in forecasting passenger traffic in Greece. In order to fill this gap, we tried to find an optimal forecasting method, by comparing Box-Jenkins ARIMA, smoothing and decomposition methods. As Greek coastal shipping consists of several concentrated submarkets (lines) we remained in fourteen popular itineraries (including total passenger traffic). Taking into consideration the high seasonality and no stationarity that characterizes those routes we limited our analysis to Winter’s triple exponential smoothing, to time series decomposition method, to simple seasonal model and to seasonal ARIMA models. Findings: The analysis results show that in fourteen popular coastal routes Winters’ multiplicative method, simple seasonal model and decomposition multiplicative trend and seasonal model have the best integration to the time series data. No coastal line led to better results by seasonal Box-Jenkins ARIMA models. Research limitations/implications: The results should be treated with caution since COVID-19 pandemic does not allow safe conclusions for the forecasting period 2020-2022 in GCS. However, the forecasting results of the first quarter of 2020, when pandemic had not fully prevailed, gave encouraging results with little deviations between predicted and actual values. Originality/value: Greek coastal shipping is one of the biggest in Europe serving a large number of passengers and having a large part of the total shipping fleet. It plays an important role for Greek economy and society, as it connects the majority of inhabited islands to mainland. The finding of an optimal forecasting method of passenger traffic is very significant for both business and government policy. Decisions on the number of routes served by shipping companies, on ships by coastal line (number and size), on companies' pricing policy, on public service obligations, on state port infrastructure policy and on the amount of state funding for barren lines are typical examples.

Greek coastal shipping is an industry which passed from the state regulatory interference to market forces. Its fare structure (tariff) was based on average (or total) cost and distance was the representative cost variable. As it is an industry facing strong economies of scale, average cost is higher than marginal cost. This means that companies equalizing prices to marginal cost, following Pareto–efficient allocation of resources, are driven to losses and are forced to seek other methods of efficient pricing policy. The purpose of this article is to examine the implementation of “innovative” pricing in Greek coastal shipping. “Innovative” pricing contains applicable measures in order to increase ticket prices in “peak” periods without affecting the level of quality, the number of passengers and the market share. The analysis results show that average fare will not necessarily raise. Ticket increases may be accompanied by quantitative discounts in periods of low demand. In these cases, “season tickets” can be applied.

The purpose of this article is to compare Greek coastal shipping and aviation industry immediately after their liberalization. It focuses mainly on fare configuration analysis of domestic and global aviation to compare the conclusions with Greek coastal market. This is an innovative approach as there has been no such research effort on this issue in the past. The importance of our analysis lies to a large extent in exploring the improvement or deterioration of passenger services for the two modes of transport following the lifting of cabotage privilege. It can be a yardstick for those researchers who want to know in advance what could happen in the first years of liberalization in a transport industry. The analysis results show that the institutional framework and the economic market conditions in two industries characterized by both similarities and differences. JEL classification numbers: R40, M21, L50. Keywords: Global and European Aviation, Greek coastal shipping, Market liberalization, Lifting of cabotage privilege, Fares, Passenger service.

Although Greek coastal shipping is a very important shipping industry, there are not a lot of scientific efforts calculating economies of scale and minimum optimal firm size in the past. In our opinion, Stigler’s survivor technique is the best-fitted method for researching these issues. It examines the configuration of companies’ sizes over time and argues that only the companies with the lowest long-term average costs will survive in a market. Methodologically, we divided coastal companies into size classes regarding the number of employees per company and the contribution of companies per size class to gross production value, gross added value, and revenue without vat. Then we checked the statistical significance of changes in market share distribution. The analysis led to the conclusion that economies of scale exist in Greek coastal shipping and the minimum firm size pertains to the employment of 20-49 employees or the operation of two ships per shipping company.