Coopetition effects among global airline alliances for selected Asian airports

Abstract

In a highly competitive environment, airlines tend to participate in global airline alliances (GAAs) to become more advantageous. This study employs IATA MarketIS data to examine the coopetition effects of three GAAs for ten selected airports. Each airport is a main gateway or hub in Asia with at least one based airline. The analysis in this paper focused on round-trip and transferred passengers for the international markets in 2018. The Herfindahl-Hirschman index (HHI) and Entropy Index (EI) were used to express the internal competition of round-trip markets for each GAA. A quartile separation with the calculation results of various traffic shares presented another coopetition status. These airports all had higher internal cooperation on transfer markets. Part of them appeared stronger internal competition on round-trip markets or external competition on transfer traffic. The airport-based airlines significantly developed home-ground advantages for their attributed GAAs.