Evaluation of financial performance of airline companies with Fuzzy AHP and Grey Relational Analysis methods

Airway transportation; In addition to its preferred speed and reliability features, it has an important share in providing economic advantage in the transportation sector. There are many airlines operating in the world and in our country. In this study, one of these four countries and the countries of its operations in Turkey by selecting the most preferred airlines have been identified as EU member states. Turkish Airlines, Turkey, United Kingdom for British Airways, Air France KLM, France, Lufthansa and finally was chosen to represent Ireland Ryanair representing Germany. Financial performance ranking was made by examining the financial rates of five airlines in the period 2012-2018. When choosing the method used in the study, it was found appropriate to use the Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (BAHP) method to determine the importance of the criteria. With the BAHP method, linguistic variables taken from expert opinions were converted to fuzzy numbers and the weights of the determined criteria were calculated. With the Grey Relational Analysis (GRA) method used as one of the ranking weights, the financial performance ranking of the mentioned airline companies was realized. When the data of 2018 were analyzed, Turkish Airlines (THY), whose financial performance was the best, was followed by Air France, British Airways, Ryanair and Lufthansa, respectively. The rankings were statistically interpreted using the Spearman correlation method on the financial performance rankings determined by the GRA method. Using Kendall's Tau correlation method, the relationship between the number of flight variables and financial performance ranking was investigated.