According to the International Civil Aviation Organization, the world aviation air traffic has grown by an average yearly rate of 5% over the last thirty years, until the devastating downturn brought on by the COVID crisis of 2020. Regardless of the current situation, there are still a number of issues and challenges that the industry is confronted with, not the least of which are related to sustainability, the conversion to electrical usage, the challenge of increasing propulsion efficiency in conventional propulsion, the digital transformation of the entire ecosystem, etc. In response, system developers and researchers in the field are working on a number of key technologies and methodologies to solve some of these issues. The Sustainable Aviation Research Society (SARES), a global organization that seeks to encourage research in this area and helps disseminate knowledge via conferences and symposia, has been organizing meetings to promote sustainable aviation over the five years. Three of these are the International Symposium on Sustainable Aviation (ISSA), International Symposium on Electric Aviation and Autonomous Systems (ISEAS), and the International Symposium on Aircraft Technology, MRO, and Operations (ISATECH).
The airport of Mexico City has been declared saturated for most of the day. For that reason, the Mexican government announced a couple of years ago the construction of a completely new one which is supposed to be operative in 2020 in its first phase. However, the technical issues and the economic downturn in the country jeopardise the project; for that reason, it is important to have alternatives that allow investing in a progressive fashion so that the investments are not lost or end up in useless infrastructure like the ones that have taken place in other parts of the world. The current work presents a simulation-based study of the alternative of using one of the runways of the new airport in a remote fashion in case the original project is delayed or even cancelled. The results indicate that the proposed infrastructure alleviates the congestion problem in the current airport, and at the same time allows the traffic growth with performance indicators similar to airports that have remote runways as in the case of Schiphol in The Netherlands.
This dissertation increases our insight into the role of the service employee’s intercultural competences in the service to culturally diverse customers. Investigating the effect of the intercultural competences of service employees is of major importance because, as a consequence of globalization, the number of intercultural service encounters has increased dramatically and still does. The delivery of service to a culturally diverse customer-base requires a combination of knowledge, skills and attitude; the intercultural competences (also known as Global Mindset). In this study the hotel sector has been investigated specifically. The hotel sector is an important economic player that continues to grow inspite of economic downturn. The special characteristics of hotel services make the sector also very suitable for the research of face-to-face encounters in an international context. In this dissertation, a holistic approach has been chosen, meaning that in the four empirical studies not only the perspective of the manager, but also that of the employee and the customer was investigated. All three of the above-mentioned are actors in intercultural service according to the argumentation of the ‘service-profit chain’ (Heskett, Jones, et al., 1994). Together, the manager, employee and the customer form the so-called ‘service triangle’ (Bitner, 1990).
