Why is Germany’s main airport in Frankfurt rather than Berlin?
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I think another interesting question is why Munich is the second largest hub in Germany after Frankfurt, not Berlin. And this is all to do with network effects of hub airports. The more connections you offer to other cities the more airlines will want to fly there to transit their customers through, and once you’ve reached that hub status it’s hard for other cities (eg latecomers like BER) to establish themselves.
The Berlin government has been quite desperate to get more long-distance flights from their airport but most of those have failed and Lufthansa isn’t even trying (they just offer shuttles to their other hub airports) as it’s too much work to build another big hub from scratch, nor is there enough demand for (premium!) flights from the Berlin area.
The latter maybe also supports the establishment of Frankfurt and Munich as hubs, as these cities and their surrounding areas are among the wealthiest in Europe.
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