Hubs at risk: Exposure of Europe's largest hubs to competition on transfer city Pairs

A study into the hub performance Emirates, Etihad Airways and Qatar Airways and their competitive position against the major European hubbing airlines

“…Meanwhile, Amadeus (2014) found that the number of International transfer travellers flying via Middle East hubs has increased by 79% over the last 5 years. Grosche and Klophaus (2015) have confirmed that the competition between European and Gulf hubs has intensified significantly over the last number of years.…”

“…The three Gulf incumbents have more widebody aircraft on order than the US and Chinese carriers combined and have big ambitions to become the world's next generation of super connectors. Many academic writings that underpin the operational success of Gulf carriers are associated with the dual impact of their transfer hub and geographical location that have allowed them to spread their network footprint so effectively (O'Connell, 2006;Vespermann et al, 2008;Grimme, 2011;Hooper et al, 2011;Murel and O'Connell, 2011;O'Connell, 2011;de Wit, 2014;Grosche and Klophaus, 2015). OAG analysis reveals the aggressive expansion profiles of the three Gulf carriers as they collectively offered around 51,500 flights to Europe in 2015, marking a 270% increase over 2005 figures, however due to the skewed portfolio of their widebody fleet, the number of seats increased by 360% from 3.6 million seats in 2005 to 16.7 million by 2015.…”

An assessment of the potential for self-connectivity at European airports in holiday markets

“…In order to discard unrealistic flight combinations (Redondi et al, 2011;Seredyński et al, 2014;Grosche and Klophaus, 2015), we impose a maximum geographic detour for each market (ratio between indirect and non-stop flight distance) based on the real-world itineraries in the MIDT file. To mitigate the influence of outliers, we discard every flight combination found by the CB algorithm that is above the 95% percentile of the market-specific distribution of geographic detour calculated from the itineraries in the MIDT file.…”

Measuring the potential for self-connectivity in global air transport markets: Implications for airports and airlines

“…For a flight combination to be valid, it must meet the published minimum connecting times 6 . CB should also be able to discriminate between realistic and unrealistic flight combinations (Redondi et al, 2011;Seredyński et al, 2014;Grosche and Klophaus, 2015). To that end, we impose a maximum allowable geographic detour for each market (ratio between indirect and non-stop flight distance).…”