Low-fare expert offers five lessons from successful airlines
Monday September 19, 2005
Successful airlines around the world consistently teach five lessons, said Conor McCarthy speaking at the World Low Cost Airlines Congress in Amsterdam.McCarthy, MD of the Plane Consult consultancy, a veteran of Aer Lingus and Ryanair and a co-founder of AirAsia, said the primary rule is that the human factors in both internal company makeup and customer relations that make airlines successful are "absolutely identical regardless of where you go around the world. Don't listen to the argument, 'Oh, it's different here.'"
Second, he has learned that the airline industry attracts too many intelligent people: "They get bored quickly and want to tweak the model and get efficiency up." The end result is that once-simple systems tend to get overly complicated.
The third lesson is that at inefficient airlines, "there is not a lot of knowledge at the top about how things work and the repercussions of their actions." In some cases, that is the only difference between successful low-cost carriers and struggling legacy airlines. "They're not as far apart as you might think," he said.
"Losing my religion" might be the song title related to the fourth lesson: "It is easy to lose track of the model," McCarthy said. Airlines start to do well and then begin to go after what they believe is easy money but instead devolve into an unfocused, inefficient mess.
And lastly, successful airlines always are looking for possible performance gaps in how they do things, benchmarking other practices to see if they are doing everything in the best possible way. "The best performers consistently give themselves a hard time," continually questioning their procedures and rules, McCarthy told ATWOnline. Believing that your way of doing things can't be improved upon is a recipe for disaster, he added.
by J.A. Donoghue
ATWOnline




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