THE PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF GROUND HANDLING COMPANIES: MCDM APPROACH

The services provided by ground handling companies at airports play an important role in ensuring that flight operations are carried out safely and securely on the airside of the airport and supporting airport authorities and airlines with services for passengers on the land side.These services have very effective role in reducing turnaround times of aircraft by ensuring uninterrupted and smooth operations, optimizing aircraft utilization, improving passenger experiences with effective and uninterrupted check-in, boarding and baggage procedures, and also play an active role in the attractiveness by the customers and determining sustainable strategies of the airlines for the future. At the same time, as the effective, efficient, and uninterrupted provision of ground handling services has an impact on the optimum capacity utilization of airport infrastructure elements, the performance of ground handling companies also makes significant contributions to airport infrastructure management. This study aims to develop a model to evaluate the performance of ground handling companies. For the model, MCDM approach was applied in performance evaluation. The model employs a hybrid model composed of Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Fuzzy TOPSIS Methods in the weighting of the criteria, and ranking of the companies successively. Model application was made at Antalya Airport.