Southwest Airlines Strengths And Weaknesses

Competitiveness Airports operate in a highly competitive environment and therefore encourage developments which make the airport sector more responsive to the needs of their passenger and airline customers. Competition in the airline sector has been a driver of innovation and cost reduction and has delivered major benefits for consumers in terms of increased choice and value. Effective competition between airports is clearly something to be encouraged for the same reasons. “Within the aviation industry, MRO, ground handling, catering, CRS and freight forwarding created economic profits, but these were much more than offset by economic losses by airlines and airports. Airlines were responsible for the large USD17 billion of economic losses globally.

Rolls Royce’s new engine designs offered exactly that and proved to be an ‘order qualifier’. The design was an advantage for all airline companies as they could consider entering exclusive deals with Rolls- Royce for their various airline models and could possibly benefit from generous discounts as a result of bulk orders. And this in turn would lead to repeated business for Rolls-Royce giving them a competitive advantage of being the preferred engine manufacturer. (Rolls-Royce: Britain 's lonely high-flier, Jan 8th 2009) Rolls-Royce’s innovative idea of ‘Power by the hour’ is a true example of an order winner. Most airline companies try and avoid responsibilities associated with projecting costs for maintenance and equipment break down.

Nok Air has two major hubs located in Don Mueang international airport, which is a central domestic airport, and in Chiang Mai. A key competitive advantage that leads Nok Air to be the top budget domestic airline and to gain higher market share is using the product differentiation. Nok Air differentiates itself from other competitors in terms of routes and periods. The firm offers a variety of routes and periods to passengers to enjoy with Nok Air compared to other competitors in the market of low-cost airline. Expanding flying route is one of the firm’s strategies to serve more passengers.

Canada being a big country and the travel time taken by road is far greater compare to air flight, the consumer prefers to travel by air to reach their destination in timely manner “The threat of substitutes is moderate due to the above stated reason. Marketing Mix: Product/ Service: As discussed earlier, Air Canada offers various services to its target market. For these services it uses Boeing 777s and Boeing 787s as a visible product. To ensure unique services are delivered it introduced some international routes to Tel Aviv and Tokyo (Air Canada, 2018). Furthermore, Executive Pod, International Business class, Economy class, North America economy class are some of the finest examples of services offered to different target market by Air Canada (Air Canada, 2018).

Secondly, point-to-point administration simplified management process to minimize cost incurred. One of the examples would be adopting a fixed sector distance within 1500km, this was proved to maximize aircraft utilization through boosting the number of flight per day (Fageda, Suau-Sanchez & Mason, 2014). Better usage of airplane guaranteed a higher cost-effectiveness in production enabled budget airline to boom

Also, some airport hubs cannot consolidate traffic bound for many itineraries. Having this limitation and knowing the fact that some passengers prefer non-stop flights, consideration of both hub-stop and non-stop routing strategies can be more cost-efficient than a pure hub-and-spoke network (Jeng 1987). In other words, non-stop flights are always the most desirable in terms of convenience but on the other hand less desirable in terms of price for price sensitive customers. Moreover, the stops at the hub airports increase the expenses for the airline companies due to the facility charges and landing fees. Therefore, the airlines can generate more revenue by considering these key parameters and applying best network routing

The company understood the tradeoffs and it knows consciously which activities should be done and the ones that should stay away. As follows, the airline focuses on short-haul, point to point routes, specialized in midsize cities and secondary airports, with very low ticket prices and limited passenger service and amenities on-board. Moreover, the high utilization of aircraft is valued, as so the high productivity of ground and gate crews in order to decrease the turnaround time. Frequent and reliable departures and on-time arrivals are other priorities of Southwest, that operates more than 3,600 flights per day over 95 destinations. The unique boarding process of this company is also a point of difference, since it does not assign any seats to passengers.

Thus, the power of the suppliers is high, since the suppliers have a grip on the market due to the huge demand of their manufactured products. Moreover, suppliers can affect the industry through their capacities to raise prices or reduce the quality of purchased goods and services. Bargaining Power of Buyers The buyers in the airline industry are demanding more and better quality services .The bargaining power of buyers in the industry is high due strong as low switching costs and plethora of options in the market. Now, e-ticketing has improved the chance and flexibility to search for different airlines companies leading to down word cost pulls and upward services push. Furthermore, it eases of switching between different airlines companies.

The company also operates point-to-point service that is not part of the mainline network. This enables Delta Express to operate point-to-point service that is not part of mainline operations. Delta Express gains leverage from being offer Delta SkyMiles frequent flier points. They introduced seasonal fares and constantly keep costs down. Even though the industry remains intensively competitive now, most the carriers have a route system well suited to their individual strengths, and fewer carriers have a route system well suited to their individual strengths, unlike fewer carriers are on the verge of bankruptcy or struggling to maintain the turnover.

Reason being is that a large portion of the high current liabilities may relate to the pre-purchased tickets, which the airline can honour for a relatively low marginal cost. b) Profitability Profitability ratios are used in an effort to evaluate management’s ability to monitor and control expenses, and to earn a profit on resources committed to the business. These particular ratios assess a company’s strengths and weakness, operating results and growth potential. Moreover, they measure on the efficiency of assets being used to generate net income and sales. The higher the ratio, the more effectively a company is using their assets.