Efficiency of Regional Airports: Insights on the Effect of Airline Type and Seasonal Variations in Traffic

Abstract

This paper aims at exploring the efficiency of regional airports, whose traffic is highly dependent on touristic flows, and the impact of some external factors such as low-cost airlines, charter air traffic and seasonality. The analysis focuses on the airport market in Greece within the time period from 2010 to 2016. A bootstrapped data envelopment analysis model is developed and the Malmquist Productivity Index is computed to estimate the total productivity change between 2010 and 2016. This is followed by a tobit regression model to estimate the impact of the external factors on the airport efficiency scores. Our findings indicate that the considered factors significantly affect airport efficiency. More specifically, the low-cost airlines and charter flights contribute to increasing airport efficiency, while the seasonality might be seen as an obstacle to improving airport efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, this research goes beyond any previous study in the Greek airport market and could be useful for several practitioners, such as airlines, airport operators and hotel businesses, as well as policy-makers and authorities.