The fleet of regional air carriers in Europe commonality analyses in a broader context of business models research

Abstract

While the tools of business model´s analyses focused on traditional and low-cost carriers are well elaborated by current economic research, regional air carriers stand aside from this research trajectory. This paper is aimed at answering the question whether the fleet commonality analysis is an adequate set-forwarding standard point to analyse business models of regional air carriers. Our analysis, covering 31 European regional air carriers (based on the descriptive data on fleet´s commonality and two variants of Herfindahl-Hirschman Index), reveals the spectrum of obtained results what indicates that there is more than one business model within the group of regional air carriers, and that fleet commonality itself is not an attribute differentiating regional air carriers from low cost carriers and traditional air carriers, nor identifying the business model of regional air carriers. This finding calls for spurring the research focused on further symptomatic features of regional air carriers in a broader context of their operation such as travel and reservation classes, customer´s loyalty programmes, network configuration, cooperation with other air carriers, domestic vs international scope of operation, cooperative arrangements with regional airports and regions within countries, participation in public service operation, and institutional framework of operation. From methodological point of view, the combination of approaches which have been already applied in the research of air carriers´ business models as well as new methodologies will be inevitable to be developed to understand more the business models of regional air carriers.