engleski

Air Transport Market Challenges in the Southeast Europe

Air transport industry is one of the very important business activities taking part in the global economic and social growth stimulating continuously trade expansion, employment, business and leisure travels and different modes of social interactions. The global recession in the years 2008/2009 and regional economic crisis in the countries of Southeast Europe caused weakening domestic demand for air travel. On the other hand, high increase of competition on the air transport market in the period 2008-2016 made positive influence on flows of people, goods, capital, technology and ideas. State of the economy and air transport industry in eleven Southeast Europe countries has been analyzed in all-important segments including airlines, airports and air navigation services. Air transport regional market is still undeveloped with relatively weak connections within the region. Financial achievements for selected dominant airlines in the Southeast Europe region are showing negative result and questionable sustainability of the business models in the future. Consequently, airlines in the region are implementing restructuring programs, covering staff reductions, increasing productivity, network and flight frequencies optimization, with intention to implement the privatization processes. Situation is relatively more optimistic from the point of view of leading airports in the region. Some improvements are also recognized after the implementation of functional airspace blocks but with different levels of success. Analysis of air transport infrastructure within the Southeast Europe region shows relatively low level of performance indicators compared to 136 countries worldwide in the year 2017. Leading countries in the region according to defined indicators of air transport infrastructure are Croatia followed by Montenegro. In general, analysis of Southeast Europe air transport infrastructure shows that there is a lot of space for improvement. The weakest performance was realized by Moldova and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Therefore, implementation of different restructuring measures and strategy improvements are necessary for the future surviving perspective of air transport Southeast Europe regional market.

Air transport, Southeast Europe, competition, restructuring, airlines, airports

Rad je prezentirala doc. dr. sc. Ružica Škurla Babić