Who owns transport, by mode

How this was computed

• Scope. 1,627 brands in 11 transport categories under Travel: airlines, rail, bus and coach, ferries, cruise lines, car rental, container shipping, logistics, airports, aviation services, and roads and parking. Hotels and online travel are excluded.
• Denominator. 1,611 of those brands have a controlling owner today (owned outright or at least 50%, from verified or reported records); 16 are licensed, minority-only or have no recorded owner and are left out of every share below. Each table states its own denominator.
• Owner type. Taken from the company type on Brandtree. Two bases are shown: the ultimate owner (the top of the controlling chain) and the direct owner (the company on the brand's own ownership link). Private includes privately held, family-owned and holding companies. A brand's direct and ultimate owner differ for only 1 of 1,611 brands, because brand links are mostly recorded straight to the top owner, so the two bases give almost identical results here.
• Concentration. The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) is computed from each ultimate owner's share of the mode's controlled brands, as on the concentration page: 10,000 means one owner, low numbers mean many owners. It counts brands, not revenue, so it is not market share. Bands (under 1,500, 1,500 to 2,499, 2,500 and over) are a reading aid only.
• Small cells. Where a mode has fewer than 5 controlled brands a share is shown as a count ("2 of 4"), not a percentage.
• Countries. The ultimate owner's headquarters country is compared with the brand's origin country. A difference shows an owner based elsewhere than where the brand began; it says nothing about where the brand operates.

Owner type by mode

Share of each mode's controlled brands, by the type of the ultimate owner. Count in brackets. Columns for owner types with no brands in any mode (private-equity funds, cooperatives, trusts) are omitted: none of the 1,611 brands has one as its ultimate or direct owner.

The same, by direct owner

Owners and concentration

Distinct ultimate owners, HHI and the top three owners' combined share, each out of the mode's controlled brands. The mode totals add to more than the all-transport owner count only where one owner (for example Lufthansa Group or Motiva) appears in several modes.

Counting brands rewards owners that publish many small brand lines. A low HHI here does not mean the mode is competitive, and a high one does not mean a market is dominated.

Top owners in each mode

Owner country versus brand origin

For each mode: how many controlled brands have an ultimate owner headquartered in the country the brand began in, and where the owners are based.

How well the owner type is documented

Owner type is only as good as the record behind it. Some owners may carry a default type that nobody checked, and a "private" type with no ownership statement in the description cannot be detected automatically. As a proxy, each controlled brand is placed in one group by the evidence behind its controlling link. Documented means the owner has a recorded stock ticker, or the link cites an annual report, a securities or stock-exchange filing, a company registry record or a regulator decision. Official statement only means none of that, and every cited source is an official page of type other_official. Other is the remainder (for example press releases or trademark registry entries).

Every controlling link in these modes states a stake (1,611 of 1,611), but most state 100% for outright ownership, so a stated stake does not separate documented from undocumented records. Only 76 brands are held through a recorded stake between 50% and 99.9%.

What this does not show

• Market share, capacity, passengers, fleet size or revenue. Every figure counts brands.
• Who ultimately owns the shares of a listed company. A publicly listed owner is counted as listed even when a state or a fund is its largest shareholder, unless that owner's type is recorded as state-owned.
• Licensed, franchised or minority-held brands (16 in scope), which are not treated as owned.
• Why any mode has the ownership mix it has. These are counts of what is recorded, not explanations, and no owner type is better or worse than another.
• Coverage is uneven: some modes hold a few dozen brands, and the brands tracked are not a census of every operator.