Airport Consulting | L.E.K. Consulting

Overview

For more than 20 years, L.E.K. Consulting has been a strategic advisor to airports around the world. With more than 700 airport, aviation authority, FBO, airline and related aviation engagements, we advise many of the world’s leading airports on their most pressing strategic, aeronautical and commercial issues.

We have superior expertise in serving airport customers, both passengers and airlines. Understanding them is the key to growing the value of the system rather than simply redistributing wealth among the existing participants.

As long-term assets, airports need to be on the front foot regarding long-term disruption. Our related practices in retail, media and surface transport are routinely dealing with the disruption of new business models such as Amazon, new mobility solutions such as Mobility as a Service (MaaS) and CAVs, and the impact of millennials’ changing habits. We bring these insights to bear in all our work in the airport sector, and help clients avoid missed opportunities or stranded investments.

To get this customer-focused value, we help airports and airport owners with transactions, privatizations, organizational structure, portfolio strategy, business unit strategy and business planning.

We also work inside the airport. In the aeronautical arena, we help with regulatory submissions, commercial evaluation of alternative development paths, capacity planning, assessment/development of new operating models and aviation marketing strategy.

Commercially, we work to increase parking, food and beverage, and retail income per passenger, and to future-proof these valuable businesses in the face of major upcoming disruption. Consumer insights and other expertise from our global retail and ground transport practices support efforts in areas such as segment and competitive strategy, new concept evaluation, business case development, and vendor negotiation.

Finally, we bring our airline network-planning experience and expertise to the development of detailed and practical airport traffic forecasts that can be used to underpin major infrastructure investment.

Key questions and challenges

Some of the questions we can help you answer are:

What is the arena in which we compete for traffic, and where can we win?

How fast is demand growing, how is it changing and when should we invest in new infrastructure?

What is the investment case for new infrastructure? What impact will a new facility or equipment (say, a runway) have on the airlines’ operations and costs, and on the national/regional economy? How do we make the case for investment?

What is the right aeronautical infrastructure? Should we invest in common user facilities? Should we use operational solutions as an alternative to capex?

How can we grow retail and, in particular, the duty-free business?

How will the consumer experience and the commercial model need to change in a millennial-driven world?

What is the competitive strategy of the parking market? How do we outcompete our current competitors in an increasingly connected, data-rich world?

What is the future of our parking and ground access strategy? How will new mobility models change airport access, and what impact will they have on parking? What are the implications for our parking investment strategy?

Can we grow overall revenue through better partnering with airlines?

How can we use big data to improve our customer understanding, and hence our performance?

What should we pay for this airport?

Examples of our work

To learn more about how we help clients create value, please refer to these case examples:

An Asian airport: L.E.K. embedded an end-to-end customer value approach that allows this airport to manage its key customer segments for value throughout the entire journey. As a result, the airport significantly improved its commercial outcomes.

An Australian airport: We helped a leading Australian airport develop its parking strategy. By identifying customer segments and behaviors, mapping the competitive environment, and reviewing the availability of capacity, we were able to help this client lift its spend-per-passenger by 20% in two years.

An Asian airport: L.E.K. evaluated alternative runway timing options from the perspectives of the airport, its carriers, passengers and the overall economy. Our findings helped the airport successfully make the case for accelerated, rather than delayed, investment.

A leading airport: We helped a leading airport develop clear runway operating rules in response to a significant deterioration in on-time performance as the asset became overloaded. OTP rose 4 percentage points inside 12 months, boosting customer satisfaction, lowering airline costs and improving the airport’s position in the local community, while still meeting the target financial performance.

A leading national gateway: We helped a leading airport develop a view of the potential future ground transport scenarios, create the best strategy for its mass transport and address the implications for its parking business.