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Greek airports in transition: From public ownership to PPP concessions
Journal of Airport Management,
9
(3),
284-295
(2015)
Abstract
The third air transport liberalisation package in the EU was fully implemented in Greece in July 1998. Nevertheless, little has changed since then in terms of the geographical dispersion of air traffic flows. The recent financial downturn of the Greek economy led to a substantial deterioration of traffic, particularly in the domestic market. The Greek state concluded an airport concession tender process in late 2014 with potentially important repercussions not only for the 14 regional airports in question but also for the wider aviation market in Greece. Nonetheless, a newly elected government announced in early 2015 that it will re-examine the whole issue, building, among other factors, on the opinions, concerns and reactions expressed by various interested groups including senior staff in affected airports. On these grounds, the present paper discusses the findings of semi-structured telephone interviews with all 39 Greek airport managers to identify the rationale behind this stance. Moreover, issues related to airport operations and development prospects are addressed from various viewpoints. The paper concludes with policy suggestions, taking into account the existing literature on airport management and ownership while combining the findings from desk and empirical research undertaken by the authors.
Keywords: airport management and ownership; market outlook and future development of air transport; airport strategy; management and operations; aviation and tourism
The full article is available to subscribers to the journal.
Author's Biography
Pavlos Arvanitis is a member of the Laboratory for Tourism Research and Studies (ETEM) at the University of the Aegean, Greece. He has taught in the UK and Greece and has worked for a regional carrier. Pavlos is the editor of Air Transport News, an online civil aviation magazine. He has contributed a chapter to the book ‘Aviation and Tourism’, published by Routledge, and his work has been presented at several international conferences. Pavlos holds an MSc in tourism management and planning from Bournemouth University and a PhD in economic geography, tourism and regional airports from the University of the Aegean, Greece.
Andreas Papatheodorou is an associate professor in industrial and spatial economics with emphasis on tourism at the University of the Aegean, Greece. In addition, he is the director of the Laboratory for Tourism Research and Studies at the same university. An Oxford MPhil and DPhil graduate, Dr Papatheodorou started his academic career as a lecturer in tourism at the University of Surrey. He has lectured and published extensively in the areas of air transport and tourism and has been actively involved in many related research and consulting projects. Dr Papatheodorou is a coauthor (with M. Stabler and M. T. Sinclair) of the ‘Economics of Tourism’ (Routledge, 2010), while two of his papers were declared as the most downloaded in their year of publication by the respective journals (ie Annals of Tourism Research, 2001; Journal of Travel Research, 2010). Andreas is also a member of the executive board of the International Association for Tourism Economics. He is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Air Transport Studies, a resource editor of Annals of Tourism Research and a member of the UNWTO Panel of Experts.
