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Commercial aviation continues to grow but few passenger or cargo journeys begin or end at airports. “Terminal” and “last” mile costs can place considerable drag on interregional trade in goods and services, attenuating growth and prosperity. The aerotropolis model provides a holistic framework for understanding – and addressing – trade costs. The central tenets of the aerotropolis model are outlined and extended by considering the decision to establish a new business facility. Implications are drawn for planning a competitive aerotropolis as the global economy enters a new era.

The rapidly changing role of capital city airports has placed demands on surrounding infrastructure. The need for infrastructure management and coordination is increasing as airports and cities grow and share common infrastructure frameworks. The purpose of this paper is to document the changing context in Australia, where the privatisation of airports has stimulated considerable land development with resulting pressures on surrounding infrastructure provision. It aims to describe a tool that is being developed to support decision‐making between various stakeholders in the airport region. The use of planning support systems improves both communication and data transfer between stakeholders and provides a foundation for complex decisions on infrastructure.

The research uses a case study approach and focuses on Brisbane International Airport and Brisbane City Council. The research is primarily descriptive and provides an empirical assessment of the challenges of developing and implementing planning support systems as a tool for governance and decision‐making.

The research assesses the challenges in implementing a common data platform for stakeholders. Agency data platforms and models, traditional roles in infrastructure planning, and integrating similar data platforms all provide barriers to sharing a common language. The use of a decision support system has to be shared by all stakeholders with a common platform that can be versatile enough to support scenarios and changing conditions. The use of iPads^® for scenario modelling provides stakeholders the opportunity to interact, compare scenarios and views, and react with the modellers to explore other options.

The research confirms that planning support systems have to be accessible and interactive by their users. The Airport City concept is a new and evolving focus for airport development and will place continuing pressure on infrastructure servicing. A coordinated and efficient approach to infrastructure decision‐making is critical, and an interactive planning support system that can model infrastructure scenarios provides a sound tool for governance.

This chapter examines the effects that airports have had on economic development in cities from 1950 to 2010. It uses a novel dataset consisting of previously unexploited data on the origins and history of the aviation system in the United States. Applying the method of synthetic controls to a set of medium and small airports, I examine both the overall impacts and the heterogeneity within the outcomes of various airports. Then, I use regression analysis to determine key factors differentiating successful airports from less successful ones, as it pertains particularly to population and employment growth. I find that, first, on average, cities have benefited from airports over this period. Airports, overall, provided a causal contribution of 0.2– 0.6% per year on population and employment growth over the time period. Second, I show that city-level factors contributing to airport success include: (1) closer proximity to a major research university, (2) a capital city location, and (3) climate factors, particularly higher January mean temperatures and/or hours of sunshine. City size is a consideration as well; cities in larger metropolitan areas, with larger shares of employment in nontradables in the 1950s, were also better positioned to reap the benefits that airports provided on city growth. Significant differences were not found across regions, airport governance structures, or other factors.

Drawing on an original dataset of major European airport companies, this chapter demonstrates the growing role airport infrastructures and their managing authorities have come to play in shaping airport politics that is, how, by whom and where airports are built, modernized and expanded.

Airport infrastructures and companies have received little attention in recent attempts to characterize and explain the transformations of global aviation politics.

This chapter suggests focusing on airport companies as an attempt to characterize their long-term trajectories both in terms of their properties and in terms of their operating contexts.

The chapter shows that airport managing authorities have developed into full-blown economic actors, which enjoy greater levels of autonomy through the systematic accumulation of resources, the diversification of revenues, and new alliances with the global finance and consulting industry. The chapter also discusses the role of privatization as the main driver for change in major European airport markets. Finally, it demonstrates the extent to which the complex interplay between public and private ownership has shaped the rescaling of the territorial dimension of airport activities, thus explaining the limited impact of anti-airport campaigns over the long-term development of major European hubs.

This chapter has larger practical and research implications, as it demonstrates the need to go beyond a functional and context-dependent approach to airport infrastructures and managing companies.

Airport economics literature has recently included the supply of concession services among the factors that might affect airport pricing. In particular, there is only little empirical analysis on whether: (i) the supply of airport concession services can stimulate the demand for travel (two-side complementarity) and (ii) the demand for airport concession services is independent of traveling activities (welfare neutrality). In this chapter, we survey papers that have addressed two-side complementarity and welfare neutrality in airport concessions. Our goal is to discuss the different assumptions that have shaped the models and to collect evidences, facts and empirical findings that may support analytical hypotheses. We argue that the notions of two-side complementarity and welfare neutrality might be interrelated – especially when airports invest in concessions in the area accessible to non-passengers. Welfare gains should be assessed on a case by case basis, depending on the type of airport in terms of ownership, size (and the relative mass of connecting passengers compared to origin–destination passengers), and the source of concession revenues. Our arguments might be particularly relevant to policy makers who need to understand (i) whether the supply of concessions reduces or increases the benefits of airport (aviation) price regulation and (ii) whether the effective control of market power may require the regulation of the prices of both the businesses.

The concept of hinterland is changing with a globalized economy, new needs between airports, stakeholders and the tourist destination challenge new dimensions of operation in the territory. Identifying new factors and actors in the influence zone of the hinterland will allow us to stage the importance of airports in the regional economy and the positive effects derived from these. The aim of this paper is to analyse the hinterland of Málaga Costa del Sol airport and its territorial and economic dimensions. Moreover, to provide an updated and clearer definition of hinterland, assuming future implications for airport operators, management of tourist destination by destination marketing organizations and scholars and practitioners interested in this topic. The results revealed that Málaga’s airport is modifying the hinterland of airport and its area of influence in economic and urban development terms.

Lessons are drawn from the experience of the logistics hub at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport for Korea s Inc he on International Airport. After providing an overview of the air cargo market the key factors underpinning the success of air cargo hubs are outlined. Examples are provided of Schiphol's multi-level strategy that aims at being simultaneously an air transport hub, a multimodal hub, and a logistics hub as a part of the airport city strategy. Consideration needs to be given to how the successful development of an air transport hub depends on the capacity problems at other competing air traffic nodes in the region. With this background, interest is centered upon the prospects of the Incheon International Airport becoming a cargo hub for Japan.

This chapter focuses on the conflicts that have accompanied the development of Germany’s largest airport at Frankfurt/Main and examines how these conflicts are embedded in regional governance and airport planning. In the German context, the governance discourse is understood as a multi-faceted framework of actors, institutions and legislation that structures the actions of involved people.

The conflicts within this framework are structured by two aspects: the spatiality of the contested object, which results in tactical descriptions of the space involved, and an understanding of airports as parts of large technological systems which strongly influences the discourse of airport expansion. As spatial conflicts regarding large infrastructures develop over a long period of time, the chapter charts the historical evolution of the expansion conflict from the 1980s until today. It analyses the governance structure and the actor’s constellations throughout time to shed light on the use of narratives and the stability and change of pro and contra coalitions. It concludes with a critical reflection on the role of airports in the German planning system and the problems of governance in the multilevel, multi-actor environment of airports.

The chapter highlights the necessity of examining the environmental impact of airports at different scales, from neighbouring cities to the large labour market stretching up to 100km from the airport.

This paper identifies and models the effect of eight attributes that influence hotel room rents in India. These attributes are conceptually grouped into three factors: (1) site factors including the presence or absence of a “swimming pool,” “free breakfast,” and the “hotel capacity”; (2) situational factors including, “distance from the airport,” “weekend/weekday,” “city population,” “cost of living”; and (3) a reputation factor indicated by “star rating.” Our regression model uses secondary data collected from a hotel booking website for 570 hotels across 18 cities of India. The results indicate that six out of these eight variables namely, presence of swimming pool, free breakfast, hotel capacity, distance from the airport, city population, and hotel star rating have a significant impact on hotel room rents in India.

Airline travel is composed of business and nonbusiness travelers, each with different preferences that give rise to differences in demand elasticities and substitution not only across airlines but also airports. In this study, we develop and estimate a model of airline wherein consumers choose which airports and airline to use that allows for unobserved differences between travelers (e.g., business and nonbusiness travelers). The results point to the role that airports themselves play in the ultimate selection of a flight, and that there are strong interactive effects between the airlines’ networks and the consumers’ preferences across airports.