FAQ - FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
AIRPORT MARKET SHARE REPORT
3) WHY DID THE MARKET SHARES CHANGE AFTER AUGUST 29TH, 2021 VERSUS OLDER DATA FOR THE SAME CITY?
4) WHY DOES SOUTHWEST AIRLINES LOOK WRONG IN THE 1990s?
5) WHY ARE THERE SPIKES IN FRONTIER AIRLINE MARKET SHARES?
8) HOW IS REVENUE CALCULATED? WHAT HAPPENS WITH BAG FEES AND SUCH?
9) WHY NOT SHOW PASSENGERS INSTEAD OF REVENUE?
10) WHY NOT COMBINE WITH SEAT SHARE FOR UNDER/OVER PERFORMANCE?
2) WHAT IS INCLUDED?
This is point-of-sale domestic revenue market share by airline, back to 1993. Data is not available before that. Prior to 8/29/2021, one graph is shown that details point of sale revenue market share by airline for the residents of the area around the chosen airport as proxied by ticketed origin city. Effective August 29th, 2021, a second slide was added that shows visitor market share to the referenced airport. This slide is intended to represent the market share of visitors, which would logically differ significantly from tickets sold to residents. For example, a carrier with a hub in Seattle would likely see strong sales among SEA residents, but in a city like Chicago where other carriers have hubs the market share would likely tilt toward those other carriers among passengers buying tickets to Seattle as visitors to the area.
3) WHY DID THE MARKET SHARES CHANGE AFTER AUGUST 29TH, 2021 VERSUS OLDER DATA FOR THE SAME CITY?
In order to add a second slide showing the market share of visitors, it was necessary to start including a process to deal with one-way tickets. The originating city of a one-way ticket do not imply a real point of sale as they are often just a roundtrip purchased in two transactions. In the past they were not considered in the calculation because of this issue. In order to separately calculate visitor market share it was necessary to start including one-way tickets as visitor market share is created by subtracting resident market share from total. Without the inclusion of one-ways it caused severe distortions. While Resident one-way sales are detailed in the source data, it was necessary to estimate Visitor one-ways as they are not shown separately, this may create some issues if the estimate was not perfect. Additionally, carriers that have an unusually high % of one-way tickets previously saw their shares negatively impacted by their exclusion. This appears to have primarily impacted Southwest and some LCCs depending upon how they price roundtrip versus one-way tickets.
4) WHY DOES SOUTHWEST AIRLINES LOOK WRONG IN THE 1990s?
Southwest began life as an intra-state carrier and was not directly controlled by the Civil Aeronautics Board and its successor regulatory entity under the Department of Transportation (DOT). As a result, Southwest was exempted from many data reporting requirements for much of its early existence. After the Airline Deregulation Act took effect in the late 1970s, things began to change and Southwest ultimately decided there were great opportunities afforded it by shedding its regulatory status as an intra-state carrier. This transition meant Southwest needed, among other things, to begin reporting many different types of data to the Department of Transportation on things like traffic, fares, etc. Southwest argued that suddenly having to provide this data was a significant hardship and obtained numerous deferrals allowing it to delay reporting and issues tied to this continued into the 1990s. The end result is that for markets that had Southwest service in the 1990s, their data is often missing or inaccurate.
5) WHY ARE THERE SPIKES IN FRONTIER AIRLINE MARKET SHARES?
Frontier has gone through phases of difficulty in accurately reporting their industry statistics. The issues are widely known by DOT and users of their reported data. For the most part, those issues are becoming less frequent, but Frontier has an established reputation for data reporting issues and delays resulting from a string of past problems. Keeping costs low at Frontier are surely at the root of the issue.
6) HOW ARE MERGERS TREATED?
All previous merger/acquisitions are combined, otherwise it would be too hard to read. For example, J7 (Air Tran) becomes WN (Southwest) through subsequent mergers. Most mergers were determined using this page from the airline trade group.
7) WHAT IS POINT-OF-SALE?
Resident Point-of-Sale means passengers living around the specified airport are included, not visitors to the region nor people connecting through the airport. Visitor Point-of-Sale would include all passengers not living around the specified airport but flying to/from the airport, while still excluding those connecting through the airport. Point-of-sale in this context is determined by where a passenger began a roundtrip. If they flew SEA-ORD-LGA (overnight in LGA)-CLT-SEA then SEA is the point-of-origin. Point-of-Sale market share is important because an airline may have a lot of flights or seats at an airport, but not be winning the local resident passenger, or may be winning only visitors.
8) HOW IS REVENUE CALCULATED? WHAT HAPPENS WITH BAG FEES AND SUCH?
Ancillary revenue is included in order to make sure ULCCs are properly counted. All transport-related revenue, excluding cargo/mail/charter, is included at a network level to get an average % of ancillary revenue. That % is added for the appropriate quarter to the ticket price.
9) WHY NOT SHOW PASSENGERS INSTEAD OF REVENUE?
This is a difficult question, but the simple answer is that a passenger metric pushes market share heavily toward the ULCC/LCCs when in reality dollars spent is a better metric of loyalty which is really the goal of a market share graph. There is a reason frequent flier programs are moving more and more toward revenue based metrics.
10) WHY NOT COMBINE WITH SEAT SHARE FOR UNDER/OVER PERFORMANCE?
Seat share is not a good metric because hubs distort it badly as often there are many seats flying in feed markets with little local traffic. QSI share has a similar issue. Additionally, it would be very difficult to visualize that data in a simple graph.
11) IS INTERNATIONAL DATA INCLUDED?
No. The DOT imposes an additional 90 day data lag on international data. Additionally, the DOT imposes citizenship restrictions on the use of this data that makes it impractical for this site.
12) WHAT CHANGES WERE MADE IN APRIL 2023?
Data records with no airline identified were dropped from the calculation rather than treated as "OTHER". DB1B Ticket and DB1B Market data began being discretely merged on a record by record basis to improve validity.