The PEST Analysis Of British Airways

Introduction

Dynamic business environments are those which are constantly changing, and businesses must be able to adapt quickly to these changes. An effective way of categorising these changes is by using the PEST analysis which was established by the Harvard professor Francis Aguilar in 1967. "A PEST analysis helps you determine how these factors will affect the performance and activities of your business in the long-term" (Contributor, 2013). In this essay, I will look at how the 4 environments identified in PEST (political, economic, social and technological) are applied to the British airline company – British Airways. This essay will mainly focus on how the external environment in recent and coming years has affected British Airways but will also include a few other airlines who also faced changes and have had to adapt or accept the consequences.

Political

In the last decade the number of terrorist attacks aimed at westerners has risen, "a major attack at Brussels Airport in March 2016 led to British Airways Owner International Airlines Group shares dropping by 1.5%" (Fletcher, 2016). This attack came just after air travel demand started to pick back up since two major terrorist attacks in 2015 – the Tunisia attack which killed 30 British holidaymakers on a beach in Sousse and the November Paris attacks. "Due to the terrorist attacks, many airlines such as British Airways stopped flights to certain countries such as the middle east and the main countries involved with the fear of their planes being attacked" (UK Essays. November