Competition in Multi-Airport Regions: Measuring airport catchments through spatial interaction models

The paper makes use of a novel dataset of the surface access flows of passengers departing from the four main airports surrounding London to construct a spatial interaction model for the region. This model explains the spatial variability in the flows through four separate components being [1] spatial separation between the origin of the flow and the destination airport, [2] the demand characteristics at the origin, [3] the attractiveness of the service offered by the airport, and [4] the presence of intervening opportunities. A spatial econometric approach is taken in the modelling to account for the presence of spatial dependence in the data.