Tourist destinations and cooperative agreements between airlines

Abstract

The important links that are formed between tourist destinations and the airline industry are evident in the previous literature. These links are active in both directions. The characteristics and the policies of tourist destinations can affect such relevant aspects as the organization of airline route networks, the inauguration of new routes and their expansion. In this study, it is proposed that the value of a tourist destination and the in- clusion of airports close to the tourist destination on the routes of an airline are also related to whether that airline decides to plan its route networks with its own resources or to complement those resources with assistance from other partner airlines through cooperative alliances, specifically code-share agreements. Taking into ac- count the assumptions of the Resource-Based and the Relational views, the value of a tourist destination can be a relevant factor in the cooperative behaviour of airlines. Moreover, the routes within which the most valuable tourist destinations are embedded can be of different types. It is therefore of interest to know whether the type of route plays a relevant role in the preference for cooperative behaviour among the routes that include tourist destinations. Around 50,000 routes and the most important global tourist destinations were considered to analyse this behaviour. The results showed that the airlines under study preferred to operate the routes that included valuable tourist destinations with their own resources, although this behaviour was more variable when differentiating between types of routes