task 4

Task 4 consists of a study aimed to gather insights from major airport stakeholders on their needs regarding slot allocation, as well as the assessment of the current IATA process, identifying its strengths and opportunities for improvements.

Following a qualitative approach, the study will involve in-depth interviews with representatives from the most important stakeholders: airlines, airports and slot coordination entities. To provide a rich understanding of the perspectives of these different stakeholders, theoretical sampling will be followed. This means that interviewees will be purposefully selected to cover all relevant sources of variability for the three stakeholders (e.g.: airports with different size, seasonality, capacity usage and growth).

Interviews will be semi-structured, following an interview protocol with open-ended questions, adapted to each of the three types of stakeholders. This protocol will address stakeholders’ slot allocation concerns, their most important goals, and their context. The interviews will also specifically address stakeholder perceptions regarding the IATA slot allocation process, its strengths and shortcomings in coping with stakeholder needs, as well as suggestions for improvement.

The information collected in the interviews will be analyzed following qualitative tenets with the support of NVivo software, identifying categories and their relationships for a thorough understanding of stakeholder goals and practices, as well as the assessment and potential evolution of current IATA slot allocation rules. Ultimately, this effort will characterize the major views on possible changes to current guidelines and practices, as well as the potential diversity of opinions among major stakeholders.

Over the past few years, the research team has established advanced contacts with airlines, airports and slot coordination entities. Recent instances include the 138^th Schedule Coordination Conference (Hamburg, Germany, June 2016) and a recent meeting promoted by the International Transport Forum at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on “Capacity Building through Efficient Use of Existing Airport Infrastructure” (Queretaro, Mexico, March 2017). These contacts will help us to establish contacts with the stakeholders to interview.

Through this qualitative study, we intend to gain a systematized and in-depth understanding of the main stakeholders’ perceptions of the IATA slot allocation process, so that they can be used in the assessment of the IATA guidelines and generate a rich set of proposals for their improvement to analyze in Task 5.