Why The Airline Southwest Meets Or Exceeds The National Rate For On Time Performance At Oklahoma City Airport

Service in the aviation industry is measured by on-time performance, fewest lost bags and least number of customer complaints

Up until 2001, Southwest Airlines (SWA) was the only consistently profitable US airline and dominated the airline industry’s “Triple Crown”; with the fewest delays, complaints, and mishandled bags for the years 1992 – 1996 (Oliva & Gittell, 2002). It routinely outperformed its competition in profit, customer satisfaction, and employee satisfaction. SWA also consistently offered the lowest fares in the industry while driving up passenger traffic in markets which it entered. SWA would point out that their net impact was to offer the “freedom to fly” to a larger segment of the traveling public, expanding the overall market rather than just taking market share (Oliva & Gittell, 2002). The U.S. Department of Transportation published a report in 1993 documenting the “Southwest effect,” which showed when SWA announced service on a new route, other airlines serving that route almost immediately reduced their fares by an average of 65% and sometimes caused increased passenger traffic by up to 500% (Oliva & Gittell, 2002).

Airlines make money by carrying passengers and cargos. In this paper, it’s been stressed only to the passengers. Rebanking or scheduling is not a foreign word to the American airline industry. Airlines had been using banked scheduled since 1980 to 9/11 terrorist attack. After 9/11 airlines, changed to rolling hub or continues hub. This system lowered the operating costs, and also dispersed the airport activity and workload. Airports did not have congestion problems, passengers didn’t have to run to catch flights, and they had more layover time, which was bad and uncomfortable in passenger’s perspective. American, Delta and United few months ago started banking the flight schedule. That’s why they are using the term ‘Re-banking”. So far this system has brought tremendous surprises to the airlines industry. It’s so far win-win situation to passengers and to the airline. Passenger could make it to the destination soon and airlines generate more money than ever. Jansen (2015) suggested that American airline expected to increase revenue $200 million (para 7).

Southwest Airlines is an airline company that has set industry benchmarks of having the best turnaround ratios, in an industry where lead time during different operations is very time consuming. Southwest currently boasts a rapid gate-turnaround of 25 minutes or less, and it demonstrates how attention to activities pertaining to ground operations (including cleaning of the aircraft, fuelling and flight preparation) can help the company in being so operationally efficient. Customers rave about low fares, exceptional customer service, and the biggest competitive advantage that Southwest has

Southwest Airlines (SWA) is the world’s largest ‘low-cost’ air carrier that is headquartered in Dallas, Texas, and operates more than 3,400 domestic flights on a daily basis. The company provides scheduled airline service to 42 states and Puerto Rico, carrying the most domestic passengers of an airline based in the United States [9]. Founded in 1967, and commencing operations in 1971, Southwest Airlines has always had a unique and breakthrough business model which has allowed the airline to maintain its loyal customer base and profitability [2]. Over the years, Southwest has maintained one of the best customer service records, and its safety record is unmatched in the industry [9].

According to our textbook, for Southwest Airlines to know that they are achieving their goals, the company executives check the internal and external metrics. Southwest Airlines collect all related information such as the tracking for on time departures, customer complaints and any mishandled baggage for the airlines. Which they compare the statistics against the competitors. They also set goals and targets for the achievement in those area mentioned earlier. The result will be providing to employees on a monthly basis, and there is communication between them through meetings, posters and newsletters.

For over decades, Southwest chose small and midsize airports in big cities, where its competition is relatively low. Using small airports is hassle-free due to less traffic and congestion with an access to major markets. This allowed the southwest to reduce its turnaround time when compared to its competitors. This increased the aircraft utilization¬ by allowing aircraft to log more hours in the air. This is quite opposite to the way the other major airlines operate. Yet, the southwest strategy gave a competitive edge to gain market share and to achieve scale economies.

Within any industry, companies seek to gain a competitive advantage that allows them to outperform competition and achieve strong profitability. In this regard, the company utilizes a younger fleet of Boeing 737 planes (average age of 7.6 years), which means less maintenance problems, fewer delays and higher customer service. In addition, the case pointed out that Southwest relies on direct ticket booking, cutting out the travel agent, therefore saving cost. Moreover, being a “low-fare, low-frill” carrier also meant not having full food service on their flights, leading to a faster turnaround time (15-20 minute turnaround compared to industry average of 55 minutes) and no assigned seats to load the plane faster. Lastly, Southwest didn’t fly into major hub airports, which translated to lower gate costs and less congestion. (Southwest Airlines Case Study, page 474)

Illustrate the meaning of “Sustainable Competitive Advantage”. What was the main strategy adopted by Southwest Airlines that made it successful in the airline industry?

Southwest Airlines (SWA) as described in the above section was an impressive organization with a long history of success; however, SWA’s performance had slipped over time as the company had not earned a “Triple Crown” since 1996. The case study, “Southwest Airlines in Baltimore,” offered a detailed look at the Baltimore Washington International Airport (BWI) in an effort to analyze challenges facing SWA in maintaining their core strategies and their continued dominance of the airline industry. BWI played an important role in the SWA system as it was one of SWA’s eight “mega-stations”, categorized because it offered more than 100 flight departures per day. It was also the central hub for SWA on the East Coast and had seen an explosion of growth in both total passengers and percentage of those passengers connecting through BWI in the past few years. BWI’s operational performance consistently lagged SWA’s system-wide average, continued to deteriorate, and with continued growth planned was a major concern throughout the organization. With the planned growth projected by management, BWI’s gates would reach capacity limits later in 2001 and BWI’s bag sorting area had already reached its capacity (Oliva & Gittell, 2002). BWI was planning to renovate Concourses A and B to provide more gates for SWA; however, SWA also took action and assigned Matt Hafner, a seasoned station manager, to attempt to elevate the operational performance of BWI. Our group was tasked with analyzing

The air travel in the United States grew fast until 2001, which expanded to approximate 642 million passengers compared with 172 million in the 1970s, however, with the combination of the September 11, 2001 event and an economic recession, the total traffic reduced to 1996 levels (Air Transportation, 2006). Today, the United States airline industry shows strong passenger demand since the 2008 economic recession, especially during peak period - holidays, in the contrast, non-peak

The results listed below are for a 95% confidence interval with a 0.05 significance. The lower and upper limit for Southwest Airlines is 3.35 to 4.69 minutes of delay. While the lower and upper limit for Delta Airlines is 2.55 to 4.04 minutes of delay. Below are my results for Southwest Airlines sample of delays less than 500 miles.

The previous chapter provided literature review of studies already conducted. In this chapter, the report will detail the type data that will be collected, how it would be collected and how it will be analyzed. This study will done in ABC airport which serves both local and international travelers

2. How significant is the 10 to 15 minutes turnaround time of Southwest’s aircraft in terms of savings in investment and utilization of its aircraft compared to competitors?

Airports are similar to cities in a variety of aspects where to happen many activities such as take-off, landings of aircraft, movement of people and freight. It is important to highlight that passengers are the essence of the airports operations considering that the primary purpose of the commercial aviation is to transport customers from one point to another point in a period of time. In over the past years airports focused only in the departure and arrival of passengers but in the current years, airports focus their goals beyond transportation of travellers with the purpose to satisfy their needs. Thus, airports offer a range of services to attract the attention of different type of customers worldwide. The aim of this essay is to analyse and understand the benefits of measure service quality due to the high competitiveness of the airport industry, taking as examples two of the best airports in the world for passengers. The two airports selected are Incheon International Airport and Hong Kong International Airport that are located in Asia, one of the markets with more demand of customers these days and in the coming years by International Air Transport Association (2015). In the direction to enrich the performance of the organisations the need to measure service quality arises, since it is vital to determine how well an airport is performing service delivery in order to survive and grow in a dynamic