Airports - March April 2015

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 April 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 March 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