Determination of airport efficiencies with three-stage data envelopment analysis and multi-criteria decision making methods and an application

The performances of airports, which are one of the most basic components of air transportation, are of great economic and social importance for the country and region they are located in. In this study, the performance rankings of airports in Turkey before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, which affected the whole world, were compared according to the relative efficiency values obtained by the three-stage Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). In this analysis, data from 46 airports in the year 2018 and 51 airports for the year 2020, including Istanbul Airport, which has just been put into service, has been used. In the second stage of the analysis; unlike the classical DEA, through the Stochastic Frontier Analysis, provincial gross domestic product (GDP), tertiary sector ratio, and the number of tourists are taken as environmental factors. Thus, it is ensured that the environmental impact and the luck factor are separated from the efficiency values and that the business performance values are based on managerial inefficiency. In addition, airport rankings were obtained with TOPSIS and ARAS methods, which are multi-criteria decision-making methods, and it was seen that the results obtained were consistent.