Financial Performance Evaluation of Airline Companies with Fuzzy AHP and Grey Relational Analysis Methods

Abstract

Air transport is an essential part of the transportation sector to provide speed, reliability and economic advantage. It is possible to say that; companies operating in the aviation sector have a financially fragile structure. There are many airline companies in the aviation sector in the world and Turkey. In this study five airline companies from EU member states and Turkey, including Turkish Airlines (THY), British Airways, Air France KLM, Lufthansa and Ryanair’s financial performance in the 2012-2018 period were evaluated. To determine the importance of the financial criteria, which were determined according to the literature, eight different expert opinions were taken and the weights of the criteria were determined according to expert’s opinions with the Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (FAHP) method. The financial performance rankings of the companies were realized with the Grey Relational Analysis (GRA) method. When looking at the analysis results of 2018, the company with the best financial performance was determined as THY. It is followed by Air France KLM, British Airways, Ryanair and Lufthansa, respectively. In the study, the Spearman correlation method was applied to the financial performance rankings determined by the GRA. The rankings were interpreted statistically, and Kendall's Tau correlation test was applied to examine the relationship between the number of flight destinations and the financial performance rankings of airline companies.