Diego Rodriguez, Deema Alomar, Seungyeon lee
10/05/09
Case Analysis Southwest Airline final draft
Jennifer Uhler
BPE reading, writing research
Background Summary
Southwest Airlines based in Dallas was founded in 1967 by Rollin King and Herb Kelleher. It is one of the major domestic airliners which provides carrier and transportation service. This company has 35,499 employees and it runs over 500 Boeing 737 aircraft in 67 cities in the US. Southwest’s principal values are:
Providing low-fare and short haul service.
Offering the highest quality of customer service.
Putting a lot of importance on the fair treatment to its customers.
Building friendly relationship between its customers and employees.
Southwest Airlines has achieved a great position in the airline industry by adopting five important strategies.
First, using the minor league airports which have helped the company to reduce traffic delays and increase passenger convenience.
Second, flying one kind of aircraft has helped it to achieve lower training cost.
Third, reducing turn-around time by using point-to-point strategy, has avoided the use of complicated reservation process system.
Forth, not offering assigned seating and preferential treatment on frequent fliers, has led the company to have better ticket price.
Lastly, emphasis on building good relationship between passengers and attendants has been a well valuable factor.
Southwest uses a different kind of reward programs. For instance, the reward for frequent fliers includes free flights according to the number of flights; which means if you fly eight round trips or sixteen one way trips, you will get one free round trip ticket. In addition the company offers free drink coupons, toll-free reservations phone numbers, and credit with a preferred partner, which means if you take fifty round trips in a year, you can designate one person to travel with you for one year.
Southwest Airlines main competitors are:...