Since it assists them to get beyond their natural home market, airlines are competing to get the highest share from transit passenger traffic. Airlines keep focusing on their geographical advantage on certain regions in terms of attracting maximum number of transit passengers. By employing Cost of Available Seat per Kilometer (CASK) parameter as the reference point, this study assesses the geographical attraction of existing and promising hubs in Europe, Middle East and Northern Africa. For the sake of this study, seven cities that are claimed to be existing and freshly emerging hubs are chosen to compete in terms of cost effectiveness. The nominees are determined as London, Paris, Frankfurt, Dubai, Istanbul, Cairo and Madrid. Over a sample of 4,080 distinct Origin and Destination (O&D) pairs which is a well demonstration of the overall transit market of the regions of interest, a model comparing the relative superiorities of those candidate cities over another are outlined. The model evaluates geographical distance and the associated cost of this distance that is computed through the base CASK function. The raw results without the attribution of O&D's total traffic standings showed that Cairo, Istanbul and Dubai performed the three best hub candidates respectively. In absolute numbers, Cairo is advantaged more over six other candidate cities. On the other hand, when the size of the O&D's are weighted, the best performing cities are founded as Istanbul, Frankfurt and Cairo respectively. In this case, Istanbul is determined to be the most efficient hub for the majority of the transit passengers.

Despite the downturn in the Aviation Industry that was apparent in 2009, the growth trend both in Egypt Air and Turkish Airlines is a demonstration of airlines' recent actualization of their potential in hub efficiency. Especially since 2005, Turkish Airlines is increasing its number of transit passengers by approximately 50% annually every year.