Who is coming up on top on an adapting aviation industry, flag carriers or low-cost airlines? and how is Tap Air Portugal performing among the industry?

• Autor(a) principal: Iachia, Manrico Jose Espirito Santo Saldanha
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/138771
• topic: Profitability; Low-cost carrier; Covid crisis; Aviation; Flag carrier; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

The Covid-19 pandemic has put the travel and tourism industry in a crisis. The biggest markets which are Europe and Asia declined 41% and 33% respectively. The international tourist arrivals have declined by 77% in 2020 leaving many companies and sectors affected specially the airline industry with 1.4 billion in losses for the industry. The aviation industry has been growing over the past 20 years reaching in 2019 a record high of $838 billions in revenue and having and contributing 4.1% to the worldwide GDP. After having the best year for the industry in 2019, the pandemic brought the worst year for the industry in 2020 with total losses of $126 Billions which is five times higher than in the second major industry crisis in 2008. All airlines had to react and adapt to the situation by becoming more flexible and lowering prices to try to get the population back to travelling and retain their customers. All airlines had to ask for financial aid from their government in loans, subsidies or taxation deferrals and innovation was crucial to rebuild the airlines business models. In this thesis, the is a focus on the commercial aviation by exploring low-cost and flagship airlines. As the definition of flagship airlines can be misleading, so only airlines with more the 50% government ownership are taken into consideration. The ways of operating these two business models are different as a flagship rely on a hub-spoke-network and being a global player. In the low-cost industry they operate through a point-to-point network by operating more in secondary airports and trying to minimize at all costs. Profitability is mainly driven by labour costs, aircraft utilization and airport dominance in an industry that have low margins these are the main factors to have into account. In the period prior to there silience phase (2019-2020) TAP was the airline registering the best growth due to the strategy implemented after the privatization. Flag carriers were the ones registering more growth. However, during the pandemic, low-cost even though there was a decline in performance were the ones surviving the best. TAP during this period had a -207% decrease in EBITDA showing that it was one of the companies that was suffering the most with resilience phase.