اتحاد استراتژیک بین شرکت های هواپیمایی و فرودگاه ها ارزیابی نظری و شواهد عملی

Strategic alliances are now widespread. This paper shifts the focus from alliances among airlines toward strategic alliances involving passenger airlines and airports. Following a conceptual path analyzing motives, potential benefits and problems, potential fields of cooperation are identified along with three basic classes of airline–airport alliances. Capacity-based, marketing-based, and security based cooperation models are assessed with regard to benefits for the participating airline and airport partners. This expands the existing literature that has largely neglected the airline–airport relationship and its potential for developing their respective competitive strategies. The case of the alliance between Lufthansa and Munich airport serves as an illustration.

Strategic alliances among airlines are now common in the aviation industry and are frequently seen as a response of airlines to changing economic and regulatory conditions. These conditions, however, change for airports as well, and airport companies have been confronted with profound governance changes over the last decade (Carney and Mew, 2003). Theory and practice debate thus centers around questions regarding models and potential benefits of alliances among airport companies on the one hand and between airports and airlines on the other.1 Although horizontal alliances between airlines have been extensively addressed in the literature (Agusdinata and de Klein, 2002; Brueckner, 2003; Pels, 2001; Oum et al., 2000) vertical alliances between airline and airport companies have attracted only marginal attention.2 From a strategic perspective, the basic motive for forming an alliance is gaining and sustaining competitive advantage for the participating companies (Das and Teng, 1999). This over-riding objective can be differentiated into a variety of sub-motives, inter alia cost and risk reduction and the access to new markets (Albers, 2000; Ebers, 1997). This paper explores the neglected relationship between airlines and airports from a strategic management perspective. Especially, it seeks to explain the potential benefits of alliances between passenger airlines and their hub-airports.

This paper has looked at the potential for cooperation between airlines and airports and identified the fields of capacity, marketing and security as having some potential. Realizable and beneficial areas of cooperation in the form of strategic alliances have been proposed and related to the reduction of uncertainty and allowing the extraction of relational rent for the partners. The most promising alliance type (capacity oriented alliance) has been exemplified by the case of Lufthansa and Munich airport. This, however, is only a first step in the conceptualization of airline–airport relationships, the opportunities to be explored and the benefits that can be achieved by its re-evaluation. The proposals offer suggestions and starting-points for a further investigation of alliance possibilities. We submit, however, that a variety of additional forms exist regarding the specific parameter values of capacity and marketing-oriented alliances. The strategy of transferring traffic to other carriers in the short-distance sector or to nearby regional airports, for example, may be useful in facilitating traffic growth. A variety of factors regarding competitors and other customers are also missed; for example, it may be expected that a preferred treatment of one specific airline would lead to a perceived discrimination of other airlines as customers of the airport in focus. The issues raised here, however, provide a valid and interesting platform for these interesting and relevant research questions as regard to airport–airline relations. Strategic alliances between airlines and airports will likely be of increasing importance in the future, caused by the continuous growth of air traffic and the progressive opening of the markets. The indications are that the tendency for liberalization and globalization will continue intensifying. In the face of increasing competition, alliances between airports and airlines offer convenient instruments for developing a long-term competitive advantage.