Air transport and events in a big city: relations and implications for Milan’s airports

Air transport is a key element for the competitiveness and attractiveness of a city. The paper aims to explore the relationship between air transport and the events in a big city (conferences, fairs, sport events, etc), finding the effect of these on daily traffic. The objective is to identify the elements that seem to affect traffic values and test if there is correlation with respect to daily demand. In order to verify this thesis, we build an econometric model which considers general variables such as the period of the year and day of the week, school breaks and events related variables, like the type of event, its duration including the preparation days, the dimension of the event. The methodology is tested with the traffic data of Milan’s airports (Italy). The application of this methodology might converge in a forecasting tool which could allow both airport operators and city managers to better tune the airport facilities and best accommodate the need of city users during large, singular, events.