ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the increasingly important practice of benchmarking. As airports have been transferred into business enterprises, there is now worldwide acceptance that the use of benchmarking, not only for airport operators but also for other interested entities such as investors, regulators and users, is a fundamental aspect of airport management for evaluating and improving performance. Most airport activities (e.g. service quality, safety and security, the environment) can be included in benchmarking analyses (see Graham, 2005; ACI-Europe, 2015c) but the focus here is on the economic and financial areas. However, the trade-off between different performance areas (e.g. service quality vs cost levels) needs to be fully taken into account. Moreover, airports have very specific characteristics and differ in many aspects (e.g. large vs small airports, private vs public airports). This will mean that airport operators are likely to prioritise the measurement of the various aspects of economic and financial performance in different ways.
