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Comprehensively evaluates the current state of the airline industry
Price discrimination essay
Price discrimination essay
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Name: Reema Alsmari
ID Number: 13113747
Price Discrimination in The Airline Industry
Intermediate Microeconomics
Words count: 1646
Price discrimination involves sells and charging the same product or service to different consumers for different prices. The monopolist needs to use price discrimination to decrease the amount of consumer’s surplus and enhance more profits. Companies can charge different prices to different individuals not based on differences on the cost of production. It depends on several criteria.
Each consumer has difference elasticity of demand, which drives the strategy of price discrimination. The company charge high price for consumers with an inelastic demand. However, lower price are being charged from
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This contract will benefit the large company’s employees by having a discount on each airline ticket. It is a price discrimination strategy, where different prices are charged for different consumers. The airline industry implies frequent flyers programs, which is very important in this particular industry. This program is a kind of price discrimination, because it consider as a kind of discount for specific customers. This program gives the advantage of any members of such a program to earn member points for each flight. This member points can be used to get a free …show more content…
By doing this, the low quality ticket is now less attractive for group 1. The airline now can charge high price of the high quality ticket at Q = 10 and still be sure that passengers of group1 will buy it. As a result for this strategy, the consumer surplus for group 1 will be equal to area B. Not to mention, group 2’s consumer surplus will be equal to zero. The third class of price discrimination is Third degree PD. It is the action of charging a different price to different consumer groups. Time of use in the airline industry can be a perfect example of third degree PD. The monopolist in the airline company when practicing 3rd degree can differentiate between passengers. The airline company will have to deal with two groups of passengers. Passengers who buys tickets at peak time versus passengers who buys it at
Spirit makes our fares so low because they know that draws in the attention of the consumer. Once they have your attention you’re shocked at the price so you go for the deal, oblivious to the fact that you walked into their trap. Southwest’s symbol for shareholders is LUV while Spirit’s is SAVE. They are not the only companies to start to enter into these paths. Hotels, rental cars and cruises are all faced with the same choice to embrace the LUV or the thriftiness with SAVE (Elliot
of price versus service in the airline industry as a whole, as well as, the
333-355. Hocking and Waud 1992, Oligopoly and Market Concentration' in Microeconomics 2nd Edition, Harper Educational Publishers, NSW, pp. 315-342. Kathleen Hanser, The Secret Behind High Profits at Low-fare Airlines'. a href="http://www.boeing.com/commercial/news/feature/profit.html">http://www.boeing.com/commercial/news/feature/profit.html/a> [accessed 15 May 2003]
Spirit addresses “price” by attempting to get the lowest possible fair for their potential customers. They have instituted their “unbundling” strategy that essentially removes all the conveniences that other airlines afford. Fees for checked bags, fees for flight changes, and no complementary in-flight beverages are just a few of the cost-trimming techniques employed. This strategy allows Spirit to come up with impossibly low fares. It also conforms to customers who just want to get from point A to point B without paying extra for services they don’t use. This strategy, coupled with an in-your-face “promotion” ploy, has made Spirit Airlines “the most profitable airline in the U.S.” (Nicas, 2012).
Even though Southwest offers no-frills, there is still a high degree of customer satisfaction that continuously builds customer loyalty for the company. As mentioned, Southwest offers low prices on their airplane tickets. Also, Southwest is renowned in the airline industry for its short turnaround time on arrivals and departures. And since people's biggest concern nowadays is money and time, having low price airline tickets to cater their traveling needs in a shorter period of time will surely satisfy them. Moreover, aside from the low prices offered, what attracts to customers is Southwest’s way in dealing with them. The employees of the airline treat their customers well and really listen to their needs.
Before to select the proper alternative, three alternatives were analysed and evaluated under four decisions criteria: customer experience, cost, growth rate / market penetration and ease to implementation (See Exhibit 2: Factor Analysis). Between all the alternatives, it was suggested that Southwest Airlines enters to New York City by bidding the slots and gates at the LGA (See Exhibit 3: Alternatives Analysis). This alternative sustains the challenge of changing the customer experience which means adding more flights from and to the East; furthermore, entering to new markets will reinforce “the power of the network” through LGA. At the same time, this decision will allow signing more code-sharing agreements with other airlines flying to international destinations and offer new products and services to LUV customers as loyalty rewards, in-flight internet, onboard duty-free purchases, etc.; as a result of this, it will increase passenger’s insights and experiences by flying with Southwest Airlines. Nevertheless, there is potential risk by selecting this alternative, in the recent years the energy prices has had a huge increase affecting costs, fares and even capacity needed, however Southwest Airlines has been able to hedge fuel for decad...
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.
The company’s cost leadership strategy of keeping their fares low to ensure frequent and convenient travel along with its playful, fun poking advertising, exciting promotional ways, and various vibrant ways of operation enabled the company to expand exuded its effect on both customer and competitors, thus lowering the prices in the new market. This is the ‘Southwest
Air travel has developed into the main form of transportation this century and its demand will double in the next 20 years. In order for airlines to maintain their profitability, they have turn to airline revenue management. Ever since deregulation, airlines have adopted this system to maximize revenue and profitability. What exactly is revenue management? Is a system designed to take advantage of the market, by segregating the market population into different categories of consumer needs, income, and overall behavior of the consumer. Through this process airlines carriers enhance product availability and price to maximize revenue.
When an airline does not have a sustainable competitive advantage, it does not have any properties of differences from there competitor and turns to a dangerous price war. The sustainable ...
Dixit, A. (2000). Growth of discounting in the airline industry: Theory, practice, and problems. (Order No. 9978379, Georgia Institute of Technology). ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, , 330-330 p. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/304592352?accountid=8364. (304592352).
There are other ways in which airlines customers are segmented. The airline services are divid...
In an attempt to capture market share, many airlines in India are flying below their cost, thus incurs heavy losses.
The second market structure is a monopolistic competition. The conditions of this market are similar as for perfect competition except the product is not homogenous it is differentiated; thus having control over its price. (Nellis and Parker, 1997). There are many firms and freedom of entry into the industry, firms are price makers and are faced with a downward sloping demand curve as well as profit maximizers. Examples include; restaurant businesses, hotels and pubs, specialist retailing (builders) and consumer services (Sloman, 2013).
An oligopolistic market has a small number of sellers dominating market share and therefore barriers to entry are high. These sellers are highly competitive and do not act independently of each other. Access to information is limited so sellers can only speculate of their competitor’s actions. Sellers will take advantage of competitor’s price changes in order to increase market share.