Divide and Conq AIRPORT ANALYSIS DUAL HUBS 46 airports of the world
AIRPORT ANALYSIS DUAL HUBS quer Ulf Meyer delves into the complex world of ‘dual-hubs’ and the rationale for their existence. Traditionally in Europe and Asia (but not North America) one big airline has one big hub, often in the national capital or the country’s largest city. The pattern has changed and continues to evolve. Many European and Asian airlines have established one or more secondary hubs to cater for strong traffic growth worldwide and to overcome problems caused by increasingly slot-constrained primary hubs. In some places, such as Australia, having more than one hub is a necessity due to the great geographical distances. Customers simply do not enjoy backtracking to somewhere their aircraft flew over an hour previously. Matching demand with flights across two or more hubs is, however, a highly complex undertaking for airlines. Geography vs demand In densely built-up regions such as Europe or East Asia, airline hubs can sometimes be right next to one another. The distance between Lufthansa’s Frankfurt and Münich hubs is under 200 miles (320km), for example, while in Asia the distance between ANA’s hubs in Tokyo and Osaka is less than 250 miles (400km). In these cases, it is not so much the possible length of backtracking but the fact that each city has its own needs for a hub. Corporations or industries sometimes create significant demand for direct flights, so much so that traditional hubs cannot grow fast enough to meet the need. Secondary hubs are sometimes created to cater for ‘overflow’. Traffic division How do airlines divide their traffic flows between hubs? Do secondary or tertiary hubs replicate the primary ones, or do they carve out a niche for themselves? Different airlines find different answers, as is explained in the following examples from the world’s top 50 airlines (excluding US carriers, LCCs and one-hub airlines). British Airways (BA) has run two London hubs for many years, Heathrow (LHR) and Gatwick (LGW). The airline currently uses LGW primarily for leisure-oriented routes, while business destinations are served from LHR. There is much cross-over on flights to Amsterdam, Barcelona, Nice, Venice, Rome, Larnaca and Las Vegas, for example. As a result, many destinations are served from both facilities. Domestic connections are limited but cities such as Edinburgh and Glasgow are also linked to both hubs. Several destinations served from LGW, such as Dubrovnik, Alicante and Málaga, plus Caribbean hotspots including Antigua, Barbados, Bermuda, Cancún, Port of Spain, Punta Cana, St Lufthansa is a good example of a major European carrier running two hubs. Its primary one is at Frankfurt and its aircraft dominate this view of Terminal 1. (Fraport) British Airways is the dominant carrier at London/ Heathrow, but the airline still provides many flights from its smaller hub at nearby Gatwick. (Sam Chui) German carrier airberlin has hubs at Berlin/Tegel and Düsseldorf. The former is used mostly for flights to Northern and Eastern Europe; Airbus A319-112 OE-LOE (c/n 3415) departs on an inter- European service in <strong>April</strong> 2013. (AirTeamImages. com/Dave Sturges) Kitts, St Lucia, Tobago and Kingston have no links to LHR. Flights to North American and East-Asian are almost solely offered from Heathrow. On a smaller scale, Virgin Atlantic Airways also has a similar division of flights between the same two airports. From Gatwick, it serves the Caribbean (to Antigua, Barbados, Cancún, Grenada, Havana, St Lucia, and Montego Bay). It also flies to two North American cities – Las Vegas and Orlando – both being primarily leisure destinations. At Heathrow, Virgin connects to Atlanta, Boston, Delhi, Dubai, Hong Kong, Johannesburg, Lagos, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Francisco, Shanghai and Washington. It launched domestic flights from Heathrow to serve Manchester, Edinburgh and Aberdeen under the ‘Little Red’ banner in <strong>March</strong> 2013 to feed into its main LHR hub. It was not a commercial success and they are due to cease this year. Europe’s approach Looking at continental Europe, how does Germany’s Lufthansa divide traffic between hubs at Frankfurt and Münich? The pattern is much less obvious than BA’s. The carrier has to an extent replicated the route network offered at Frankfurt since opening its second hub in Münich in 1992. Both are business/city-focused. Münich has larger number of routes to Italy and the Balkans but does not serve many of the longhaul destinations that Frankfurt does, including Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Osaka, Nagoya, Denver, Detroit, Dallas, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Houston, Johannesburg, Qingdao, Nanjing, Shenyang, Orlando, Toronto, Seattle, Vancouver and also cities in South America, Africa, the Middle East, Russia and Central Asia. Even within Europe, second-tier cities such as Geneva, Basel, Gdansk, Poznan, Wroclaw, Katowice, Riga, Vilnius, Tallinn, Turin, Bologna, Stavanger, Bergen, Billund and Gothenburg, Graz, Linz, Marseille, Lyon, Toulouse, Birmingham, Edinburgh and Aberdeen are only linked with Frankfurt which serves 95 more cities than Münich. Even some German domestic destinations, such as Dresden, Leipzig, Stuttgart, Friedrichshafen and Nuremberg are only linked to Frankfurt – at least for now. Münich has exclusivity on Lufthansa flights to Ankara, Antalya, Charlotte, Cologne, Izmir, Larnaca, Montréal, Sarajevo and Tbilisi. Lufthansa’s subsidiary Swiss International Air Lines (SWISS), with its dominant hub at Zürich, serves around 20 destinations from its secondary hub at Geneva. Services are a replica of Zürich, with the exception of Porto, indicating the carrier is not seeking to differentiate its hubs, but rather just serve local demand in the west of its home country. German carrier airberlin is another two hub-airline with almost symmetrical bases at Berlin/Tegel (TXL) and Düsseldorf (DUS). The DUS hub provides flights to some leisure destinations that TXL does not (including Cancún, Curaçao, www.airportsworld.com 47