The purpose of this working group is to promote the implementation of best practices in strategic planning, continuous forecasting/budgeting, performance measurement, enterprise risk management, and benchmarking principles and techniques at airports; and to standardize, improve, and implement related industry surveys.

Working Group 2018 Chair

Damian Brooke
Vice President, Finance/IT
Tampa International Airport

Working Group 2018 Projects

  • Conduct a follow-up survey of airports that completed the last benchmarking survey. The objective of this follow-up survey is to understand how airports use the benchmarking survey results, so that the benchmarking survey can be streamlined to provide better value to airports.
  • Form a taskforce to analyze the responses to the usage survey (Task #1) and pare down the benchmarking survey to a manageable number of metrics.
  • Conduct a webinar in mid-February to (1) present the results of the FY2016 benchmarking survey, and (2) present case studies on how airports use the survey data. Through the webinar, solicit volunteers for the taskforce in Task #2.
  • Conduct the ACI-NA Benchmarking Survey for FY2017.  Increase the number of participants through direct contact with the target airports, working to increase participation of small and medium hub airports and regain the participation of airports that responded to the benchmarking surveys before 2015.  Prepare a list of target airports, and assign outreach responsibility based on which committee member has the strongest existing relationship with a target airport.
  • Present the results of the FY2017 Benchmarking survey at the ACI Annual Conference and in another webinar in November 2018.

Working Group 2017 Achievements

Annual ACI-NA Financial Benchmarking Survey

This working group has been conducting the Annual ACI-NA Airport Financial Benchmarking Survey since 2007. This survey, which currently tracks approximately 590 data elements, has proven to be a valuable tool for airports in evaluating their operational and financial performance. The Working Group worked on improving the benchmarking survey for collecting FY2016 results prior to the survey launch. Another survey was conducted to determine whether airports complete the FAA Form 127 first or the ACI-NA survey first. The results informed the ACI-NA staff on how to structure data input to make the benchmarking survey more user-friendly to airport respondents. A total of 92 airports (27 U.S. large hubs, 22 U.S. medium hubs, 26 U.S. small hubs, 7 U.S. non-hub airports, and 10 Canadian airports) responded to the 2017 survey.  The final results were presented at the ACI-NA Annual Conference in Fort Worth on September 17.

Benchmarking Workshop

The Working Group conducted the third Benchmarking Workshop at the 2017 Business of Airports Conference, led by a team of representatives from Nashville International Airport and Tampa International Airport. The Benchmarking Workshop included presentations and small break-out sessions. The Tampa-Nashville team introduced new and better tools for data analysis and visualization.