Introduction
Southwest Airlines is the world’s largest low-cost airline. [1] It is headquartered in Dallas, Texas. The US airline operates more than 3400 flights every day. It has nearly 46000 employees and services 93 destinations in 41 US states and abroad. [2] It was founded by Rollin King and Herb Kelleher in 1967 and its current CEO is Gary C. Kelly.
Southwest Airlines is best known for its operational excellence, specifically the “low cost carrier” (LCC) model. The globally admired attributes of LCC are as follows: [3]
1. One Plane model instead of many
2. Point-to-point route structure instead of hub-and-spoke model
3. Single class of service
4. No meals on flights
5. No assigned Seating
Core Competence and Competitive Strategy
In the
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Did not promote connecting services
• Savings in reduced taxi time, fewer gate holds and less in-air waiting time
• It doesn’t coordinate its services with other airlines
• Southwest maintains excellent customer satisfaction ratings, according to the Department of Transportation Southwest ranks number one (lowest number of complaints) of all US airlines for customer complaints.
• Southwest began adding Wi-Fi to its aircraft in the first quarter of 2010. [11]
Growth of Southwest Airlines
According to figure 2, since 1999 the airlines have seen ups and downs in their net income. But when we consider the linear trend line, it shows a downfall. [12]
How Southwest drives towards
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The second stage is where the candidates are supposed to have an one on one interview, where they evaluate the entire attitude of the candidate.
Customer Service role is one of the first job roles that they have to perform:
The ‘Positively Outrageous Service’ that is unique to Southwest is the result of the meticulous approach which creates the conditions where the employee feels that they belong to the organization.
There are also several aspects that play a very significant role like the operation of fleet that should consist of just one sort of plane.
As seen in Figure 5, the shift from 717’s and 737-700’s was crucial for the company as 737’s not only provide a longer range, but also crucially saves all the cost of the repairs and spares for the fleet and it’s also completely logical as it saves a lot for the company on backend process. [14]
Figure 6 shows the Southwest market capitalization that rose from 2007 to 2012, a remarkable 25% growth in revenues, which lead to a complete capitalization of the domestic industry of US aviation customers