Essay on Opportunities for Southwest Airlines

Introduction

Southwest airline expects much improvements after recent the years of achievements in the airline industry. Particularly, ongoing fleet expansion and modernization of network root will assist to offset rising operation expenses and facilitate its competitive competence in international flights especially in Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States. As such it is upon the new management to plan accordingly and wisely and utilize such opportunities.

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The first opportunity that southwest has to capitalize on is the acquisitions of the AirTara. This move will ensure that the organization expands its services in other important markets. Basically, it will have an opportunity to increase to other markets such as Baltimore and Boston at the same time diversifying the routes to other new destinations such as Atlanta. Additionally, the merger also provides the company access to slot-controlled markets such as Ronald Reagan Washington in DC and New York La Guardia where previously the company could not reach or had very little presence (Holloway, 2017). In its simple meaning, widening the routes through the acquisition of the AirTran the organization has the opportunity to enter into a new system and phase of international flights that it was not enjoying before and be able to compete with big and known airline companies such Emirates Airline.

Secondly, there are still several national and international markets that are still free and have not been tapped by other airlines, Southwest can venture into those markets and command big customer base before they are saturated. Particularly, Southwest Airline has the capability to operate in near- international terminuses such as parts of Mexico and Caribbean. With the accomplishment of their reservation system overhaul that is currently ongoing, the company should consider operating on those routes and increase their revenues. Notably, they are presently involved in a lawsuit to internationalize Hobby Airport located in Houston, where they have put much infrastructure investment and have a significant presence, which is likely to ease the move to the new markets.

Southwest airline should also capitalize on the growing global tourism and increase the number of flights to different destinations. According to the study conducted by Holloway (2017), the global tourism is predicted to grow at CAGR of over 5% with 6% in some potential countries such as the USA in the next five years (Holloway, 2017). In most cases, global trend in the tourism industry has been a determinant of business in airline industries. This is exactly determined by the number of people traveling. In order to capitalize on this opportunity, the company should introduce several flights to accommodate many visitors who are likely to travel in future. This can only be done by venturing into new markets where such global growth of tourism is likely to occur.

Conclusion

The company should also capitalize on the growth of technology to provide more services to the customers. As it is now, most airlines companies have installed internets which allow customers to browse as they travel. For Southwest to match such organizations, all flights should be equipped with the service charge $6, irrespective of the duration taken by the customers (Holloway, 2017). As of February 2013, about 166 of the fleet's 610 Boeing 737s had been installed with WiFi. However, the company has not fully utilized the technological revolution of installing games such as football and other games which command big customer to be watched during flights.

References

Holloway, S. (2017). Straight and Level: Practical Airline Economics: Practical Airline Economics. Routledge.