On 28 March 2025, Reuters reported a Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) consultation on airline commitments. British Airways and American Airlines would offer rivals Heathrow or Gatwick slots for London–Boston, London–Miami and London–Chicago services. This was a proposal, not a final decision or an infringement finding.
Access has a destination attached
This historical March account provides the starting point for an economic question: what does access to a shared facility actually let a competitor sell? The following discussion is original editorial analysis, not a description of additional terms in the proposed commitments. It does not state current requirements or incorporate later decisions.
Consider a hypothetical airport serving two different destination markets. An additional airline on one route does not necessarily give a traveller on the other route another suitable option. Both departures use the same airport, but the customers' journeys are not interchangeable. A count of operators at the terminal can therefore answer a different question from a count of alternatives for a particular trip.
The input and the market are different units
A useful way to think about this distinction is to separate the operational input from the commercial offering. The first concerns access to a facility. The second concerns what a passenger can buy between particular places. Changing access at the first level can be relevant to competition at the second, but only if the two levels are connected in the analysis.
- What facility is the scarce input associated with?
- Which destination market is the proposed access intended to serve?
- Would an airport-wide comparison hide differences between routes?
- Are the units being compared departures, operators or passenger choices?
These questions are deliberately analytical. They are not an eligibility checklist, a statement of allocation rules or a claim about any carrier's application. The illustration of an access gate is likewise a metaphor, not a diagram of a regulatory procedure.
Capacity can be counted at the wrong level
Imagine a terminal with more airlines than before, all adding service to destinations unrelated to a particular traveller's journey. The airport-level total has changed, while the relevant choice for that traveller may not have changed at all. Conversely, a change on one destination market might matter to those passengers without transforming the airport's overall scale.
This is why the unit of comparison belongs near the beginning of a competition discussion, rather than in a footnote. A resource can be shared physically while its commercial usefulness depends on the market it helps an operator reach. The relevant question is not simply whether more access exists somewhere, but where that access fits within the offering being compared.
The March proposal is useful for examining that distinction. It does not supply a numerical estimate of consumer savings, an allocation price or evidence of newly operated flights. Those would be separate factual questions; the economic focus here is the relationship between a scarce input and the specific market it can support.