A Comparative Study Of Westjet

r market by entering into strategic code-sharing agreements with international carriers, such as Cathay Pacific , and American Airlines

JetBlue Airways, the latest entrant in the airlines industry has gone through the initial stages (entrepreneurial and collectivity) of the organizational life cycle rapidly under the successful leadership of David Neelman. JetBlue Airways is currently in the formalization stage of the life cycle where in it needs to create procedures and control systems to effectively manage its growth. Also as it proceeds to grow further to reach the elaboration stage, JetBlue needs to continue to align itself with the environment in order to maintain its sustained growth.

Westjet came into the air travel business in 1996, offering fares up to 50% cheaper than there competition. They strived for an excellent relationship between the employee and the employer by creating an ecstatic, friendly work environment. Westjet is one of the most successful airlines as it did start out with the most start up capital any airline has ever experienced, as well as keeping their debt to a minimum. With such commercial success, Westjet was questioned with their actions towards Air Canada as one of the founders employed a travel agent to find out certain information about Air Canada which gave them a competitive advantage so they knew exactly what price would be a noticeable difference, which would attract

How serious is the threat from conventional airlines that want to imitate the westjet culture? What does it take to imitate organizational culture? Can Air Canada compete against westjet’s employee productivity and its relationship with its employees?

o “In March 1984, … they finally agreed tentatively to lease and remodel Newark Airport’s Terminal C.” (p. 14)

WestJet is a Canadian low-cost carrier, which was founded in 1996 and headquartered in Calgary, Alberta. WestJet is Canada’s second largest airline with high per cent of the domestic market. It provides scheduled and charter air service to 86 destinations in Canada, the United States, Mexico, the Caribbean and Central America. WestJet operates an average of 425 flights and carrying over 45,000 passengers per day. In 2012, WestJet carried 17,453,352 passengers, making it the ninth-largest airline in North America by passengers carried.One of WestJet’s main values is to be positive, passionate and entertaining in everything they do which make them different from any different airlines.

WestJet develop their IT operation early and force them get the lead in the aviation businesses. However, as the global economic and the change of people’s demand, the strategic plan of WestJet need to be change to follow the change of the world. Compare with other aviation business, the IT structure of WestJet is small and keeps running on their pervious operation before Smith join into the organization. There are some risks coming out if WestJet continue these IT operations.

The most influential stakeholder is the IT staff (employees) in regardless to their resistance in the beginning of change but this due to human nature for resist the change either is positive or negative, also if these employees get redundant this will have a negative effect on the rest of the employees, they might be thinking of the same that they can become redundant anytime and will not work efficiently. For that WestJet applied a comprehensive solution to motivate their employees such as job challenging, Facilitation and support, regularly update knowledge and effective interpersonal work relationship. Moreover, this group of stakeholder have the most important role in IT transformational plan in Westjet because they already working in

WestJet is also facing a strategic problem, the longer term impact that growth is having on WestJet’s culture. WestJet’s success and competitive advantage have been a direct result

Air Canada’s early strategy was to grow the business, with minimal concern about their staff members and customers. Without any benefits or rewards their staff felt underappreciated. Their customers felt as though their feedback wasn’t being heard but in the eyes of Air Canada as long as their business was expanding, they were satisfied.

1. There are a few trends in the US airline industry. One is consolidation, wherein existing players merge in an attempt to lower their costs and generate operating synergies. The most recent major merger was the United Continental merger, which is still an ongoing affair, but has created the largest airline in the United States by market share (Martin, 2012). Another trend is towards low-cost carriers. In the US, Southwest has been a long-running success and JetBlue a strong new competitor, but in other countries this business model has proven exceptionally successful. The third major trend is the upward trend in jet fuel prices, and the increasing importance that this puts on hedging fuel prices and capacity management (Hinton, 2011).

There are other drawbacks of Westjet IT department, the disparate professional skills of IT staff, the lack of a backup data centre and the around clock onsite support. All these problems affect the competence of Westjet, comparing with the industry benchmark. Smith recognized these problems and conducted a plan to solve them. Her first priority was to restructure

One of the first things that Cheryl Smith did when she start to work at WestJet, was to bring two performances expects to carry out a benchmarking study with similar companies in the transportation industry. The objective of this study was to compare WestJet’s IT cost, resources and budget to the industry standards. With the results of the study, Cheryl was able to find out that the IT group of the company was technically competent and mostly were since the

JetBlue Airways, the latest entrant in the airlines industry has gone through the initial stages (entrepreneurial and collectivity) of the organizational life cycle rapidly under the successful leadership of David Neelman. JetBlue Airways is currently in the formalization stage of the life cycle where in it needs to create procedures and control systems to effectively manage its growth. Also as it proceeds to grow further to reach the elaboration stage, JetBlue needs to continue to align itself with the environment in order to maintain its sustained growth.

British Airways (BA) is a company that encountered several difficulties back in the 1970’s and 1980’s. The poor performances of the organization, was leading the company to failure. BA was offering a service that even though it accomplished the mission of the company, was not providing customer satisfaction. The organization was not taking into consideration the needs of the costumer and was not providing an acceptable customer service experience. “Productivity at BA in the 1970s was strikingly bad, especially in contrast to other leading foreign airlines” (Jick, Peiperl, 2010, p.28). Due to numerous changes, the company increased their revenues and became a respectful and well know organization.