Azul Airlines: mapping out its competitive profile and the reactions triggered

摘要

Azul Airlines just completed two and a half years of activity in Brazilian domestic markets forscheduled passenger service and is already the third power in the industry, just behind the TAMand GOL virtual duopoly, accounting for 7.5% of Brazilian domestic revenue passenger-kilometres.The aim of this paper is to deepen the analysis first developed in Bettini and Oliveira (2010) byintensely exploring publicly available data on capacity at airport- and route-level, measured interms of number of departures. First, we return to the theme of the entry pattern of Azul Airlines, tryto understand its rationale and compare it with existing paradigms. Second, we perform acomprehensive study on capacity-wise rival reactions Azul triggered. Amid these two mainobjectives, we also present the reader with the latest developments of Brazilian passenger airtransportation and also review some theoretical topics and stylized facts on airline capacity settingand scheduling practices.