The first annual AIRPORT WORLD CUP bracket selection show was held Saturday night (you probably did not see it on TV). The brackets are set and the competition will start soon. I thought I’d take this opportunity to provide a sneak preview at the how the airports line up against each other in the 1st round. To be impartial I simply used the publicly available ranking of airports based on passenger traffic, and simply took the first 64 airports ranked according to annual passenger traffic. The airports have been separated into 4 “Divisions”: Boeing, Airbus, Embraer and Bombardier. To keep the tournament moving along, the first round will have 2 “matches” in a poll each morning once the competition starts. Each match will be open for voting for 36 hours. This tournament will follow the same format as MilesQuest’s Airline World Cup.
You can view the bracket here: AIRPORT WORLD CUP MASTER BRACKET
Somehow the main Delta hubs got pitted against each other in the first round (ATL-SLC and DTW-MSP). Kind of strange.
its how the airports fell in terms of their traffic. I’m going to revisit the brackets later today and may make some adjustments if they’re warranted.
@LF : but isn’t the objective of the world cup is to rank the best airport, not just the largest airport ? (that’s ATL, but nothing close to Top 10 best from any passenger perspective)
just the bottom right quarter. the list of airports is much weaker in terms of pax preference than the other 3 quarters. so we might run into a scenario in which SFO or SYD is in the final 4.
And this “seeding” is not comparable to NCAA since a “weak seeding” here is defined as low traffic volume, but when you’re asking end-users to rank them in a world cup, then “weak” would be defined as “undesirable” – and we all know that pax volume rarely correlates with pax preference.
@ MGD I understand what you’re saying. I’ll look at the brackets again to see if what your saying can play out. I just didnt want too much of a “human element” involved in seeding the airports. But if there is a compelling case to “tweak” it, I’ll do it. Thanks for your input! 🙂
Ouch! SLC a 16 seed! Time for an upset!
The seeding was out of my control!!
There’s a Cinderella in every tourney!
The brackets are highly flawed because HKG SIN ICN all belonged to the top left branch, ensuring that no more than one of that group can be in the final 4… Even though those are ranked top 3 in the world frequently
Its not a flaw, its simply how they fell in the rankings of passenger traffic. The fact that they all hit the same bracket is a coincidence. I did not want to start making discretionary decisions as to where an airport should go. Seeding based on passenger traffic is the best / most equitable way to distribute the airports. Were there some bad breaks for airports? Absolutely. But that holds true for NCAA tournaments as well. And in this case, these were not ranked in the top 3 globally for passenger traffic. They may be voted as best airports for non-numeric measures. But as far as ranking based on passenger traffic, they were no where near close to one another.