In Search of Benchmarks for Airports ...

… MSP’s Jeff Hamiel may be offering the first significant step. The long-time executive director of Minneapolis-St. Paul International says it’s time that an airport of any size be able to benchmark its various operations and services against comparable facilities. What industry has today, he asserts, is a “hodgepodge†of performance measures, but no definitive benchmarking tools that could serve to help set priorities and provide clearer direction to a governing body. That was the overriding message Hamiel had for an audience attending a session at the annual meeting of Airports Council International-North America last week. The first step may be the dissertation he submitted to earn his Ph.D. recently, which took a first crack at benchmarking, using data from 33 hub airports he surveyed. He plans on publishing his dissertation later this year and to make it available to industry for free via the Internet. In it he looks at some 120 areas for which an airport can measure performance – measuring specific operations or services and not just an overall airport, per se. In this way, the benchmarking can be more “apples to applesâ€, says Hamiel. The only thing holding up publication, explains Hamiel, is a final chapter which the judging professors requested. That is, his analysis of the thesis with which he earned his Ph.D. They reasoned that with his years of experience he was as qualified as any to offer an assessment. Thanks for reading. jfi