Consultancy Seabury launches ASGairport, a route planning platform, with Düsseldorf Airport as first customer

Seabury Airline Strategy Group, an aviation advisory firm with offices in New York and London, has launched ASGairport, a digital platform that helps airports build the business case for new routes. The company showed it on 21 October 2026 at Routes World in Frankfurt. Düsseldorf Airport is the first customer.

Airports spend a lot of time trying to win new flights. They need to show an airline that a route will fill seats and make money. ASGairport is built for the airport teams that do this work. It looks at the airport's catchment area and finds the places people already fly to, but through other airports. It then checks whether a direct route from the home airport could work.

The platform does not stop at a list of cities. It fits each case to a given airline: its way of doing business, the aircraft it flies and how its flying changes with the seasons. The result is a business case the airport can take into a meeting with that airline. Düsseldorf says it wants its route development to rest more on data and less on guesswork.

Düsseldorf is the biggest airport in North Rhine-Westphalia. Around 18 million people live within 100 kilometres of it. Norman Schulz, Managing Director and Partner at Seabury Airline Strategy Group, said: "Düsseldorf has more people within reach than almost any airport in Europe." Henning Pfisterer, Senior Vice President for Aviation at the airport, said the tool gives his route development team a way to find the most promising route options.

Seabury Airline Strategy Group was formed in 2023 through a merger. It says it has worked for more than 80 airline and alliance clients in over 50 countries. Its advisory work covers network planning, airport route development, fleet planning, partnerships, costs and operations. ASGairport joins the firm's ASGnexus set of tools, which already includes products for airline network planning, fleet planning and partnership modelling.

Why this matters for consultants

Advisory firms used to sell route studies as one-off projects. Here a consultancy has turned its method into software and sold it to an airport. Other aviation consultancies that help airports with route development may face the same choice: keep selling studies, or build a product. Airports, for their part, get a tool they can use between conferences, not only when a consultant is in the room.

Düsseldorf Airport has a page on The Flying Engineer. Aviation consulting firms are listed on our consulting page. The platform was launched at Routes World 2026 in Frankfurt. The next edition, Routes World 2027, is expected in Barcelona in October 2027.

Source: Consultancy.eu, with details from aeroTELEGRAPH and the Seabury Airline Strategy Group website.