Getting closer to your destination: The role of available surface connections on the supply of low-cost carriers in secondary European tourist airports

Secondary airports have played a key role in the development of both low-cost carriers and the tourism industry in recent decades. Although they are usually further from tourists' main destination/origin, low-cost carriers take advantage of lower fares to exploit tourists' lower time valuation. Nonetheless, efficient surface commuting is a key attribute of airport accessibility and a source of relative attractiveness in multi-airport systems. Low-cost airlines have recently changed their strategic behavior by opting to spread their presence at primary airports, which represents a challenge for secondary airports that have both declining traffic and high dependency on low-cost carriers. In this paper we evaluate the role of private and public transportation commuting time efficiency in the quarterly market share of secondary airports for a sample of European multi-airport systems between 2018 and 2021. Our results show that relative commuting efficiency- whether public or private -is a determinant of traffic distribution in multi-airport systems. Public authorities might be interested in improving secondary air-ports' accessibility when other airport policies are constrained, either to reverse their current adverse trend or to efficiently utilize existing capacity in systems with highly congested primary airports.