The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on airport business models: an assessment of the UK case

The external environment has a significant influence on the air transport industry and the fluctuation in this market impact multiple organisations starting from airports. While the market presents a gradual and continuous change, the impacts of these external events can be significant at the business level. For example, macro events and disruptions have consequences on the organisation structure of airports. Additionally, airports are seen as part of the local community and have multiple types of responsibilities at the local level in addition to the responsibility at the national and international levels. The responsibilities at the local level combined with the macro and market factors lead to complex systems and the need for readiness against multiple types of challenges and disruptions. Further, it is possible to highlight airports’ vulnerability against vastly diverse and impactful events from global financial crises, and public health issues to developments in aircraft technology, airline decisions and passenger behaviour. Therefore, these have necessitated airports to strengthen their business models to improve business continuity and resilience.

This PhD thesis aims to investigate the airport product and services, operations, activities, and financial sustainability from a business model perspective in the case of a disruptive event. By exploring this aspect, recommendations can be made to understand the implications of sudden demand shocks on airport business models and resilience. Therefore, this thesis applies the business model (BM) concept and framework in order to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on each key airport BM component. Also, exploring the resilient BM concept to offer recommendations for improvement through in-depth semi-structured interviews with senior airport managers and key stakeholders during the pandemic.

In this thesis, there are 3 main steps used to explore this aim. Step 1 assesses the pre-COVID-19 UK airport market and business components to provide a comparison against the during and after pandemic situations. Step 2 analyse the changes in the market and key airport BM components during the pandemic. Step 3 explores the future planning and resilience concept. This step identifies key future planning and strategic approaches and future airport BMs. Additionally, the final model and approaches are designed to support airport business resilience. Lastly, the validation stage provides the assessment of the findings for airport resilience while exploring the concept in the post-COVID-19 world.

To conclude, research results present that the COVID-19 crisis revealed the most vulnerable areas in airport BMs. For example, the weaknesses around cost control, the reintroduction of government control to a liberated market, the need to introduce more flexibility in normally fixed business infrastructure, improved collaborations, and further commercial opportunities. This crisis enables airports to explore their BM components in detail which led to the revelation of weaknesses and strengths under pressure. This research further reveals the impact of the pandemic on key business components while revealing the recovery planning, future BM approaches and challenges. This is important due to the ongoing issues airports are experiencing in the recovery stage and the requirement to improve the preparation for the next crisis. Most importantly, participants have been frequently emphasising the significance of areas such as providing business continuity during a crisis and building resilience for the future. Therefore, the final designs identified the key areas and suggestions to build resilient airport BMs. These findings from the thesis are able to support and give guidance while providing recommendations for airports to improve their BMs to face the next crisis or another disruptive event.