Analysing the Network & Schedule Performance of Airlines and Developing a Passenger-Centric Commercial Methodology for Air Services

In the aviation industry and academic literature, there are a number of methods to compute and benchmark the perceived quality of the airline schedule. However, these are open to criticism in the sense that they solely use the airline’s schedules as the input for the quality computation rather than the consumer’s perspective. Injecting dynamic consumer preference metrics on top of the existing network evaluation methods is the aim of this research.
Therefore, the research brings a new and innovative passenger-oriented perspective on airline network and schedule design, an outlook regarding the “quality” of supply rather than the sole “quantity” of the supply. The model also helps to compute schedule-service quality indexes by understanding consumers’ priorities and preferences through a survey. Using the schedule data of main legacy and low cost carriers in the Middle East, Europe and Africa the model produces a “realistic market share” estimation for each airline serving particular routes.
The model’s outputs provide guidelines to effectively shape the airline planners’ investment decisions in the sense that, the airline executives will be enabled to numerically assess the estimated realistic market share change of a potential investment and to benchmark the performance of their products against competitors. Moreover, the research contributes to the academic literature by conceptualising the comparative and competitive advantages of airline schedules and network designs from a consumer-centric perspective.