Benchmarking competitiveness of cargo airports

Abstract

To stay ahead the increasing competitive markets, the airport management needs to monitor and improve performance by referencing to and learning from other organizations. This study formulates a systematic approach for competitiveness benchmarking and provides insights to the airport management for performance improvements, with main focus on air cargo and Asian airports. Firstly, a benchmarking framework is constructed for comparing the competitiveness of cargo airports against each other. A hierarchy of 7 core factor groups captures all important aspects and an algorithm is formulated to compute the competitiveness index for sample airports. Next, the top 10 Asian cargo airports are benchmarked using the framework. The competitiveness index is tested against the conventional airport measures, and the relatively high correlation proves the validity of the framework. Lastly, an in-depth analysis is conducted to distill best practice and implications for performance improvement from the platform built upon the framework and benchmarking results.