Strategic management or strategic leadership, understood as conscious, logically structured action, affects decisions that influence the fundamental direction of a company. They serve the goal of securing the long-term success of the company by developing competitive advantages.

Strategic airport management consists in the day-to-day management task of adapting the entire organization of the company to constantly changing market conditions, meeting the wishes and needs of passengers and airlines as well as many other customer and interest groups, constantly developing advantages over old and new competitors and to develop and use the strengths and capabilities of the company.

Every airport organization needs to make a variety of strategic decisions, each with a long-term impact on the business and the environment. Such decisions must be made on the basis of carefully prepared decision-making principles and agreed with a number of cooperation partners and stakeholders.

Like any other business enterprise, airport operators must be guided by private-sector goals, adapt to the evolution of market demand, leverage technological advancements, and continually evolve their services and products. In many business areas with increasingly liberal framework conditions, growing competition and increasing service and price pressure on the part of customers and ever-increasing quality requirements on the part of end users must be met.

In addition, airports as transport infrastructure carriers also have superordinate, transport-political (public service) tasks. Business and tourism locations are in an increasingly intense international competition, their accessibility and connectivity to some distant international business centers (connectivity) is becoming more and more a strategic competitive factor in today’s globalized world. Functioning airports are the gateway to the world, but are increasingly becoming a dominant bottleneck factor in the aviation industry due to increasing restrictions.

At the same time, airports are independent economic and industrial sites, comparable to small cities that serve many industries as an ideal business location. The larger airports become, the more attractive they become as a hub for those industries that derive their benefits from efficient short, medium and long-haul transport links. Airport managers must therefore also deal with typical municipal tasks of a city administration.

On the whole, airports are complex and in some areas extremely complex organizations whose leadership and development requires strategic thinking and strategic management.

All important company decisions are based on a clearly structured strategy and corporate planning that is integrated in terms of content as well as process, showing possible developments and bringing decisions on individual projects or initiatives into an overall context. Strategy and corporate planning forms the core for the implementation of  tools for strategic corporate management. Based on the corporate planning system, additional tools can be introduced to support different business areas. Important uses for such “strategic airport management tools” are:

• Financial Airport Controlling,
• Airport Marketing and Customer Relation Management,
• Strategic capacity management of assets and personnel,
• Innovation and quality management and
• Environmental management.

Like all planning systems, an airport planning system must include all important factual planning areas (completeness), reflect logical connections between the individual planning elements (integration), remain comprehensible for all involved (transparency) and enable simple and rapid adjustments to changed framework conditions (flexibility). , Ultimately, the planning system must also reduce the time and cost of planning and reporting (efficiency).
In addition, due to the high complexity of the subject matter of the planning and the particularly long-term impact of the decisions to be made, airport planning systems must cover other essential aspects. Due to the nature of an airport as an infrastructure manager, particular importance is attached to the ability to map long forecast periods and to reduce the high degree of complexity resulting from partially reluctant objectives by focusing on strategically relevant aspects.