The Technical Efficiency of French Regional Airports and Low-Cost Carrier Terminals

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper seems well written, but I find the methodology is reasonable. I hope the comments below help improve the paper through the revision process.

I have a difficulty to understand the concept of “technical efficiency”. The authors need to define it very clearly. Is it really operational efficiency?

High-speed line (HSL) is uncommon. I think High-Speed Train (HST) will be enough.

Line 56, do you mean 400,000 passengers or 4 million passengers?

Line 114, what does m mean? Million? The authors should give enough details regarding the writing of the paper. The paper is very abstract and hard to follow.

Line 120, what does 99 mean? 99 airports?

Line 162, equation d_jk is not clearly presented. There is another example in line 179. Please update the equations throughout the paper as needed.

Line 215 needs to be removed.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you for inviting me to review this article. I read this with much interest as LCCs are widely seen as an environmentally unsustainable proposition – minimal social cost recovery, short distance (therefore substitutable), creation of mass demand, use of smaller aircraft, and multiple trips daily.

I think the scientific analysis of this paper is solid, and the presentation is also fairly clear. The authors have broken down the MPI of French airports according to their size, and have reported some interesting findings about the variability in productivity and cost efficiency across airports

My comments are mostly therefore qualitative, and encourage the authors to consider a little more about the implications of the following observations:

It would seem that large airports are some of the most efficient (although this is not surprising due to EoS), and that they become more productive with the attraction of LCCs. Could the authors reflect a little what this means for sustainability – I find the study a little too econo-centric at the moment, and almost misses the point of why it is published in Sustainability. For instance, in the conclusion, the paper seems to be advocating the building of more LCCTs and more privatisation to drive greater traffic growth? What are the implications of this to the environment? I wonder if there’s any relationship between airport size and their availability to attract foreign LCCs? Presumably, foreign LCCs and longer-distance flights would concentrate at larger airports; whereas regional airports should host mostly shorter, domestic flights? What does this imply for your findings? For instance, on p.11, the authors write “LCCs do not necessarily increase the efficiency or profit of the regional airports in France” – is this something to do with the fact that the French government is trying to maintain a minimum level of service at regional airports, a la in the US? The data used in this research is a little dated (2006-2012). It is about one whole period older than the present date. Could the authors please explain a little why newer data is not available, and in a fast moving industry what this means for the results and findings? Finally, the technical portion and the interpretive section of the paper seems a little disjointed. Can the authors flag a little more clearly how LCCs factor in the calculations of the MPI?

This is an interesting paper that is logically presented and well-researched. For the purpose of Sustainability, I hope however that the above points would be considered and that the paper would be able to speak more to the remit of the journal.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf