This paper targets to assess Flight Centre’s strategic situation in 2003, focusing on discovering key issues in pursuing future profitable growth. Furthermore, strategic solutions to their issues will be considered and a refined strategy proposed based on the analysis.
Flight Centre’s strategic situation
Industry definition
Flight Centre describes itself as a global discount flight specialist. Taking into consideration the relative size of the Australian and international operations as well as the availability of information on global environment and competitive factors, for this analysis, it is more appropriate to consider the Flight Centre’s industry environment as “The Australian international and domestic airline ticket provider industry”. Flight Centre’s major source of income is generated from provision of airline tickets in Australia and the operations are mainly focused on providing airline tickets.
Environmental analysis
The macro-environment affecting the growth of the industry as a whole is summarized in Table 1.
Political/Legal Economic Socio-cultural Technological Demographic
- Terrorism, wars and disease outbreak (-)
- Governments stimulating economic growth by monetary policies (+) - Increasing disposable income for households(+)
- Decreasing unemployment (+)
- Favorable currency market for AUD (+)
- Expected slowdown of growth of Australian economy (-) - Increasingly fashionable to travel (+)
- Increasing fear of travel internationally (-) - Technology leading to more efficient way of providing services (+)
- Technology leading to forward integration opportunities for suppliers (-) - Ageing population with increasing wealth (+)
Neutral Positive Neutral Neutral Positive
Table 1 Environment analysis
The macro-environment indicates moderate growth for the industry. The unstable global political environment and the resulting fear of international travel seem to be outweighed by the long term global and local