Introduction
British Airways used to be Britain’s national airline until it was diversified in the 1990s. British Airways is currently a leading international airline brand and it has had to position itself strategically in an increasingly competitive global business environment.
This paper examines the strategic environment and the relevant strategic factors that relates to British Airways. It will focus on features and factors of the aviation industry and how it affects British Airways. From there, the paper critically evaluates the strategic choices that were made by British Airways and the results that were attained from the strategic choices made by the airline.
Background of British Airways
British Airways is part of the International Airline Group (IAG) which is incorporated in Spain and has in its portfolio Iberian Airlines (Gray and Gray, 2011). British Airways however remains an entity that the British government has significant investments in and a strong influence within (Gray and Gray, 2011). The slogans of British Airways include “To Fly, To Serve” and “The World’s Favorite Airline; Upgrade to British Airways” (Gray and Gray, 2011).
British Airways is positioned as a premium airline that targets the upper middle and the middle class members of societies (Barrett, 2010). They therefore offer premium services that targets young and old professionals, business executives and managers. These are operation are launched and conducted in richer and upmarket sections of societies around the world.
The airline also seeks to target passengers who prefer comfort and reliable services (Barrett, 2010). They have corporate customers and seek to acquire premium service seekers who want a flying experience that includes a high ...
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... with the fall in market share by presenting themselves as a partner in the development of nations and communities around the world. This helped them to enhance their services and their offerings in the nations and communities within which they operated.
Conclusion
The strategic environment within which British Airways operated posed a major challenge to the organization. This includes the credit crunch, competition and other matters that made British Airways look less efficient. In response to this, British Airways set up a system through which they aligned their operations and affairs to segment their operations and respond to the main challenges and the main differences in the external environment. British Airways also concentrated on entering new markets like the Asia Pacific region and also concentrating on the local UK markets by acquiring other aircrafts.
The airline industry has long attempted to segment the air travel market in order to effectively target its constituents. The classic airline model consists of First Class, Business Class and Economy, and the demographics that make up the classes have both similarities and differences to the other classes. For instance, there may be similarities between business class travellers on a particular flight, but they will not all be travelling for the same reason. An almost-universal characteristic of air travel is that customers do not fly for the sake of flying; the destination is the important element and the travel is a by-product, a means-to-an-end that involves the necessity of an aircraft that gets the customer from point A to point B. Because the reasons can differ greatly in the motivations for a customer wanting to fly, it can be difficult to divide the market into discrete segments, that is, there is always going to be overlap in the preferences and characteristics of any given segment. With that in mind, the commonalities that are shared between the clientele that make up the respective classes can easily withstand analysis.
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“To be the best airlines in whole world and providing excellent customer experience in our flights with full entertainment and loads of satisfaction.”
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