6. Discussion
6.1. Service/facilities management implications Our results demonstrate that hub airports and associated carriers are not just simple utilitarian elements of transit that merit scant attention from researchers and destination managers. Concurrently, however, neither satisfies the definitions normally associated with ‘tourist attractions’. Occupying the blurred boundaries between transit region and destination region, both Changi Airport and Singapore Airlines together with their embedded facilities and services therefore may be described as a type of ‘quasi-destination’. These are essentially transit locations or services such as a flight path, aircraft or hub airport that also possess some characteristics of a destination. The most important criterion that qualifies these elements as quasi-destinations is the presence of services and facilities that have potential effects of attracting interest from stopovers to revisit the hub city as a future stayover visitor. This potential, however, is not uniform, given the identification of three distinct passenger clusters wherein transfer frequency and time, not unexpectedly, are correlated strongly with re-visitation interest.
