Study on Methods of Determining an Airport’s Catchment Area

Author: MSc. Bui Dang Trinh; Prof. DSc. Jacek Skorupski
            Warsaw University of Technology, Faculty of Transport
            ul. Koszykowa 75, 00-662 Warszawa, Poland

In fact, there are many experimental as well as theoretical studies on the factors influencing passengers’ airport choice. However, there are not many studies on determining which be an attractive object for a certain airport, that is, there are not many studies on determining the airport’s catchment area.The airport’s catchment area is a geographic area around the airport where it can reasonably expect to draw commercial air service customers. The airport customers are those who want to use the airport to make their trips and can afford to pay for their trips. It should be noted that the customers’ affordability should be taken into account in the future, not just at the present time.

The airport’s catchment area is still determined on the basis of travel time from the departure point to the airport. Accordingly, the airport’s catchment area is an area around the airport, in which travel time from the farthest point to the airport is approximately 2 hours. This method is very simple and easy to apply. However, the biggest disadvantage of this method is that it ignores the factors influencing the passengers’ airport choice behavior. According to this method, the size of the airport’s catchment area is always fixed. However, when a certain factor influencing the passengers’ airport choice behavior changes, the size of the airport’s catchment area will change.

In order to overcome such shortcomings, the article will introduce a method of determining the airport’s catchment area on the basis of the passengers’ airport choice behavior. This method shows that the size of the airport’s catchment area will change when there is a change in a factor influencing the passengers’ airport choice behavior.

Contents of this article are divided into five sections. After the introduction, the 2nd section will introduce some literature related to determining the size of an airport’s catchment area in the world. The 3rd section will be about the method of determining the airport’s catchment area from our point of view, the 4th section will present the results of applying our method at Noi Bai International Airport and the last section will point out some comments on the above method.

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