AIRPORT ANALYSIS DUAL HUBS Milan/Malpensa was once a major hub for Alitalia, but today it has limited hub connections and some long-haul flights for the flag carrier. During better days, Boeing 777-243ER EI-DBM (c/n 32782) taxies to the runway in September 2009. (AirTeamImages. com/Jan Severijns) 48 airports of the world
AIRPORT ANALYSIS DUAL HUBS Varadero, Puerto Plata, Punta Cana, Fort Myers – all in the Caribbean – as well as Djerba, Florence, Ibiza, Lanzarote, Marrakech, Marsa Alam, Miami, Naples, Olbia and Sylt). From Berlin, the carrier connects to several Northern European cities, such as Gothenburg, Bergen, Helsinki, Oslo and Stockholm, as well as Eastern European destinations including Bucharest, Budapest, Gdansk, Kaliningrad, Kraków, St Petersburg, Sofia and Warsaw. It makes TXL the airline’s hub focusing on Northern and Eastern Europe. Unlike DUS, Berlin also has direct flights to Chicago, Miami, Paris/Orly and Rome, as well as domestic destinations such as Saarbrücken, Karlsruhe, Cologne, Frankfurt and Nuremberg. Air France and Dutch flag carrier KLM merged in 2004, although both retain their individual identities. Traffic is concentrated on the airlines’ respective hubs at Paris/Charles de Gaulle (CDG) and Amsterdam/Schiphol (AMS). The case of Air France-KLM is special because it is not so much one airline serving two hubs, but a double airline with one hub each. KLM serves some destinations from AMS that the larger hub at CDG does not. If you want to travel to secondary cities in East Asia such as Hangzhou, Xiamen, Taipei, Chengdu, Manila or Fukuoka on the Air France-KLM network, you will be routed via AMS, since Air France does not offer any of these destinations through its Paris hub. The same is true for Norwegian cities such as Bergen, Stavanger and Oslo and the Danish cities of Aalborg and Billund. Together with Helsinki and Gothenburg, this makes Amsterdam the Nordic and Scandinavian hub for the two-airline-group. The important oil and gas industry generates a considerable number of flights to the Scottish cities of Aberdeen, Glasgow and Edinburgh. All are served direct from AMS, but not CDG. Other exclusive destinations from AMS include: Abu Dhabi, Accra, Almaty, Aruba, Bahrain, Bonaire, Calgary, Cali Cape Town, Chicago, Curaçao, Damman, Dar es Salaam, Bali, Doha, Entebbe, Guayaquil, Havana, Kigali, Kilimanjaro, Kuwait, Lagos, Muscat, Nairobi, Paramaribo, Quito and Vancouver. Air France offers many non-stop connections to sub-Saharan Africa that Amsterdam does not, including to Abidjan, Abuja, Antananarivo, Bamako, Bangui, Brazzaville, Conakry, Cotonou, Dakar, Djibouti, Douala, Freetown, Kinshasa, Lagos, Libreville, Lomé, Malabo, Monrovia, N’djamena, Niamey, Nouakchott, Ouagadougou, Port Harcourt and Yaoundé. In Latin America, Havana, Brasilia, Caracas and Montevideo are only connected with CDG. In East Asia this is true for Guangzhou, Ho Chi Minh City, Tokyo/Haneda and Wuhan. In both France and the Netherlands the vast majority of domestic services route passengers through their respective hubs, meaning for some passengers two flights can be required before joining a long-haul connection. In Southern Europe Alitalia has struggled in recent years, both financially and against increasing competition from LCCs. Although no longer considered one of the largest European carriers, it still has three hubs. Milan/Linate, mostly serves domestic destinations but also connects with Amsterdam, Barcelona, Brussels, Bucharest, London, Paris and Warsaw. All of these cities are also served from the China Southern Airlines Boeing 737-81B B-2695 (c/n 32923) shares the apron with Airbus A320 Family aircraft at Shanghai/ Pudong Airport in December 2012. (AirTeamImages. com/Dave Sturges) Oslo/ Gardermoen is one of three Scandinavian hubs used by SAS. It is also of increasing importance to resident carrier Norwegian Air Shuttle. (AirTeamImages. com/Jorgen Syversen) main hub in Rome/Fiumicino. However, people living in the wealthy north of Italy do not enjoy going south to the capital to then ‘backtrack’ north. Consequently, Milan/Malpensa offers a rather eclectic mix of Alitalia long-haul destinations, including Moscow, New York, Tokyo and Tunis, but no European connections and only one domestic route to Rome. In Northern Europe, Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) is another multi-hub carrier. The tri-national airline had three bases – in Copenhagen, Stockholm and Oslo – from its outset and thus manages a ‘triple-hub’. These heavily compete with one another. Today Copenhagen (CPH) is the most important of the three for SAS (even though the airline is headquartered in Sweden), mainly because it is furthest south and thus closer to the rest of Europe. The Danish capital has a few world-city connections that Oslo and Stockholm do not. Most noticeable are the long-haul destinations of San Francisco, Shanghai, Tokyo, Washington and Beijing, although some smaller German and Polish cities are exclusively served through CPH by SAS, such as Bremen, Hannover and Stuttgart in Germany and Warsaw, Wroclaw and Poznan in Poland. Other ‘exclusive’ SAS destinations reachable from CPH are Athens, Bologna, Bucharest, Budapest, Leeds/Bradford, Luxembourg, Newcastle, Palanga, Pristina, Tel Aviv and Venice. Oslo (OSL) is the only SAS hub to have direct flights to Chania, Gran Canaria, Nice, Prague, Reykjavík and Alanya. Stockholm is the only SAS hub that does not serve any destination the other two do not. Straddling the Euro-Asia border, Turkey’s busiest airport is Istanbul/Atatürk, the primary hub for the rapidly expanding Turkish Airlines. Istanbul’s second airport, Sabiha Gökçen, is rapidly catching up and already offers flights to Amsterdam, Baku, Berlin, Brussels, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Kiev, Kuwait, London, Milan, Münich, Paris, Tehran, Tel Aviv, Tbilisi, Sarajevo and Vienna. Across both facilities Turkish Airlines flies to 218 international destinations in 107 countries, making it one of the most geographically varied air carriers in the world. It connects to 100 European destinations, 66 in Asia and 42 in Africa. Asia/Pacific In China three major airline groups compete for the millions of customers. All run more than one hub – in most cases this is a necessity due to the vast size of the country. China Southern (CS) serves 193 destinations in 35 countries from its hubs at Beijing, Guangzhou, Chongqing and Ürümqi. The carrier has 485 flights a day from Guangzhou and 221 from Beijing. The main hub is connected to a plethora of Asian destinations as well as Frankfurt, San Francisco, Amsterdam, Auckland, London, Paris, Vancouver, Moscow, New York and Los Angeles. The four big Australian cities (Melbourne, Perth, Sydney and Brisbane) are also directly www.airportsworld.com 49
Change language