Airline Industry Essay

The United States carries over one third of the globe’s total traffic, where Over 1.5 billion passengers fly annually. Over the past 20 years, air travel has grown at an average of about 5% per year, the reason for annual change is usually differences in economic growth, and of course other environmental factors, such as the current war. As a rule, the annual growth in air travel has been about twice the annual growth in GDP. Deregulation, liberalization, and competition have essentially altered the management strategies and practices of airlines. Productivity improvements and cost management have been two of the greatest concerns for US airlines for the past twenty years. As a whole, the airline industry must continue to improve their specialization in terms of fleet utilization, pricing and revenue management, and schedule optimization.

Southwest Airlines is a company that is known for its low ticket prices and profitability despite the highly risky industry in which it operates. This essay examines the cost behavior, cost volume profit (CVP), activity based costing (ABC), budgeting process, costing and decision making policies of the firm. The essay will discuss how the airline integrates these concepts in its daily operations.

The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 shook the United States in a profound way, deeply upsetting the national perception of safety within U.S. borders. No industry or sector of the economy felt the impacts of these events more than the airline industry. Both the immediate reaction to the attacks and the long-term repercussions have negatively affected the industry. Today’s airline industry is much different than it was prior to September 11. There is a much smaller work force, more low-cost carriers, more security and more fees associated with flying.

While it is difficult, to some extent, to evaluate the success of a merger that is only just now entering its final implementation phases, it is known that the objective of that merger was to use the larger route network to attract more business, and that the combined airline would also extract cost savings as the result of increased operational efficiency. The airline had struggled in 2009, with its sales declining, but it recovered in 2010 and 2011. Sales last year were $33.678 billion, up from $21.068 billion the year before. In the past two years, the company has turned a profit, going from $253 million in net income in FY2010 to $840 million in net income in FY2011. Some of this improvement may stem from the impact of the merger. However, the airline industry is highly cyclical, and the past two years have represented economic improvement. Likewise, the losses the company faced in FY2008 and FY2009 were as much the result of the economic downturn as they were internal business factors.

The purpose of this memorandum is to address the profitability issues at Continental Airlines and to estimate the costs for 2009 to forecast the future outlook of the company. To address these issues, I used regression analysis to observe what effect the 11% reduction in flying capacity would have on the firm’s future operating costs. I also used the results from the regression analysis to verify the costs that, if reduced, would further comply with the implementation of cost-cutting initiatives and operational efficiencies that the company is striving for. Lastly, I consolidated the data to forecast Continental’s financial outlook for 2009, then provided insight

American airline industry is steadily growing at an extremely strong rate. This growth comes with a number economic and social advantage. This contributes a great deal to the international inventory. The US airline industry is a major economic aspect in both the outcome on other related industries like tourism and manufacturing of aircraft and its own terms of operation. The airline industry is receiving massive media attention unlike other industries through participating and making of government policies. As Hoffman and Bateson (2011) show the major competitors include Southwest Airlines, Delta Airline, and United Airline.

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).

In a televised interview on “CEO Exchange Mr. Don Carty, CEO of American Airlines discusses his frustration with labor cost. Now, American Airlines is facing a Chapter 11, bankruptcy filing. American Airlines is the world’s largest fleet of about 1,500 airplanes which serves international customers. Being the largest fleet, American Airlines employees around 113,300 employees that are overseen by three different unions. (“American Airlines – Wikipedia,”n.d.) The unions are made up of The Allied Pilots Association, The Association of Professional Flight Attendants and Transport Workers Union. The three unions had agreed to a 1.62 billion in annual concession, which was presented as retention bonuses and to protect the pensions for top executives. The concessions were said to keep the organization from filing bankruptcy, after a 1st quarter loss of $1.04 billion. (Under Fire for Perks, Chief Quits American Airlines – the New York Times, n.d.). Mr. Don Carty, CEO of American Airlines stated that there two major challenges. One which is better business motto “cost to premium is not bigger that our revenue to premium.” Identify the product elements that

1. Describe the various promotion elements that Southwest Airlines uses in its integrated marketing communications.

A drop in fares has been the best result of the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978. It has been the impetus for the increase in the number of flights, which in turn has spurred a drive for greater safety in airlines. But with the current airline market, this development has given us one negative. Since ticket prices have dropped to new lows, the realities of an industry which operates on such economies of scale dictates that only a few competitors have the capacity to operate within the market. This is not the desired effect of either political side on this issue, but it is an economic necessity with the environment that has been created, very similar to that of public utilities and phone companies.

Airlines must operate within a low-margin, high-fixed-cost environment, making profitability particularly sensitive to decreases in volume, either from environmental factors (e.g., the September 11,2001 attacks) or from competition. Moreover, the airline business is labor-intensive. Labor costs as a percentage of revenues ranges from a low of about 25 percent for the low-fare airlines to almost 50

The Airline industry has experienced continual problems with rising costs with both fuel and maintenance which has caused them to increase their fees to the consumers to pay for those rising costs. This paper will help explain what an airline such as Delta does to help alleviate such costs without forcing its consumers to flip the bill through high fees that consist of tickets, baggage fees and food. The costs of doing business in aviation today have spiraled out of control making it very expensive for both airlines and the

4. Several major airlines filed for bankruptcy. Many airlines significantly decreased their capacity, reduced their routes and postponed purchases of new aircraft. Some airlines reported a 50% reduction in routes and flight frequency. All these events provided opportunities for the low-cost carriers not only to increase the number of flights but also to introduce services on new routes.

Conceptual air carrier, Poppi, provides the framework for an analysis that will be discussed throughout this paper in regards to disruptive technologies and their effect on the airline industry. Baltzan (2015, p. 231) observes that disruptive technologies are “a new way of doing things that initially does not meet the needs of existing customer.” Shu (2015) offers the airline industry is continually trying to reinvent itself to attract attention and increase revenue. However, the stress and headaches experienced by most

The aim of this report is to provide information based on the airline industry which will show a breakdown of our knowledge by showing an understanding of the External factors that influence the airline industry.