Short-haul airline services in Europe and North America - A cross-business model and cross-continental analysis

We examine short-haul services offered by the respective 10 largest European and North American carriers in terms of fleet composition, network characteristics, airfare and product attributes. Our cross-business model and cross-continental analysis builds on the index approach developed by Klophaus et al. (2012) to derive a typology of the hybridization among the largest carriers in Europe and North America in short-haul markets. Our results indicate that none of the largest European and North American carriers follows the pure LCC business model in short-haul markets, and all the LCCs in Europe and North America have adopted certain degree of hybrid strategy to offer short-haul services combining business practices traditionally considered typical for FSCs or LCCs. The results also confirm the categorization of most of the carriers labelled as FSCs. In addition, the study provides evidence of further convergence of airline business models in the short-haul market during the last decade. Still there is no standard short-haul business strategy despite common industry standards for some service features.