I think it would make sense when an airlines is strong enough , it could be able to improve its hub airport rating. For example an airport used to be 4-bar for passenger and 2 for cargo, but because super strong airlines uses it as its hub, the rating should improve to passenger and cargo accordingly. It would be more interesting if the airport rating is dynamic instead of static.
This does not make sense The airport bars show O/D (origin destination) demand. Once you make hub, you still have same number of O/D passengers but you increase connecting passengers. You can actually "steal" O/D pax on route A->B for your route A->C->B, because demand is static (moving only with AGEX) so the airline offering A->B flight may find itself having less pax on its route after you start offering A->C->B route (because each connection will get some share of pax, regardless of its position, of course the better the position the more the share it gets).
One flaw of AS is that hubs such as ATL, ORD, LHR, JFK, DXB etc get more O/D traffic in AS because AS generates demand based on real life flights which include number of boardings. That means real-life hubs will have more O/D traffic in AS because the real-life connecting traffic increases passenger boardings, which in turn increases AS O/D traffic data. We would need exact origin and destination of each real-life transit passenger, and this data is almost impossible to get. So for now we must accept the next best thing, and that is the situation as it is now.
In the future things may improve somewhat with introduction of regional demand, sue of secondary airports, and more weight given to PTP connections. But that is not coming to the computer screen near you in the foreseeable future (give it maybe a year or two).
Anyway back to the airport bars ... you do not need a 10 bar airport to create successful hub. It is hard work to make a 6-7 demand bar airport hub, but can be done. There is an airline on Tempelhof which made a very successful hub out of Cambodia. How much O/D traffic does Cambodia have in real life? But the payer was able to make a very successful hub out of it.
Hi,
take a quiet regional airport. Add a fast growing airline with lots of destinations. If that airport now has 100 passengers, 50 of them may be "stolen" from other airports in the region. But the other 50 may well be "newly generated" passengers. People who travel by plane instead of taking their car or a train, people who now go on a city trip because that nearby airport offers interesting flights, and so on.
If that is what Hawaii2468 means, it does make sense. Demand creates offer, but offer also creates demand. At least, in reality it does ;-)
Jan
Thank you Jan, that's sort of what I meant. Also for cargo hubs, many factories or business just want to be close to a hub airport and the more routes an airport has ,the more business it would attract , that increases the demand rating. It can work similarly on the passenger demand too, people just move to live closer to an airport because of the needs to travel .