southwest airlines case

After establishing a unique business model in the airline industry, Southwest has had its fair share of imitators. Yet none of these efforts at reproducing the success of Southwest have reached expectations. There are many reasons why imitators of Southwest have struggled so much but one of the biggest is the success of Southwest’s human resource management. Southwest is able to pay its employees less than the other major airlines yet get more production out of them. This is due to Southwest’s family atmosphere as managers try to foster a sense of teamwork and purpose. As a result, Southwest’s employees work very hard for less money and benefits of this include quicker turnaround times and less employees needed to run daily operations. The two biggest imitators who were potential threats to Southwest were Continental Lite and United’s Shuttle. Neither one of these airlines could match Southwest’s turnaround time of 15 minutes as they both struggled to even get their times under a half an hour. Southwest’s pilots averaged 20 more hours a month of flying time while they were paid almost 100,000 dollars less than pilots at United. Southwest’s gates were operated by about half as many employees as gates of other airlines including continental and united. So while CAlite and Shuttle flights were significantly cheaper than their parent companies, they were still at a competitive disadvantage to Southwest. These imitators still use a hub and spoke system and cannot match the simplicity Southwest has in its business model. So as long as Southwest continues to get great production from its employees and sticks to its strengths like only flying 737’s and staying away from major airports, imitators will be doomed to fail.