This book offers the first comprehensive exploration of frequent flyer programs. By combining academic research with extensive insights and examples from the actual business world, it explores the key drivers and strategies of airline loyalty marketing today in an unprecedented manner. Strategy in Airline Loyalty also explores how the programs have evolved over time from marketing programs to financial powerhouses, identifying both the catalysts for change, as well as the strategic options and underlying trade-offs available to airlines. Covering diverse angles ranging from behavioral economics, to accounting, and structural design, the book reviews every core aspect of frequent flyer programs and offers extensive frameworks and definitions. The book provides a useful and complete reference for researchers, and helps those interested in frequent flyer programs to develop a better understanding of their past, present and future.

Applying fundamentals of marketing to commercial passenger air transportation, this textbook puts the emphasis on marketing principles and illustrative ways in which airlines can distinguish themselves within the highly competitive global marketplace. Fundamentals of Airline Marketing begins with a survey of current airline business strategies and the macro forces that have shaped the airline industry in the past and will continue to do so in the future. The growing importance of technology is discussed both from the perspective of better understanding customer needs and engaging more effectively with them. The central role of the "customer" is explored through the lens of modern segmentation and branding approaches. Coverage then shifts to the tactical decision areas consisting of the 4Ps—product, place, promotion, and price—in which marketers shape and execute their strategies. The book concludes with a focus on executing marketing initiatives internally through customer-facing employee groups and externally through the measurement and management of the customer experience. Fundamentals of Airline Marketing: • is an accessible textbook on the fundamentals of marketing for commercial passenger air transportation; • chronicles the marketing innovations and controversies that have been central to the historic shift in airline fortunes; • demonstrates how airline decisions fit within the fundamentals of marketing and how the marketplace is continuing to evolve; • provides a bridge between key marketing principles and their specific application to the airline industry in each chapter. This textbook is written primarily for undergraduate college students enrolled in aviation business administration programs and related courses. It will also serve as an accessible primer on airline marketing for industry professionals not presently working in marketing and for frontline airline employees seeking to learn more about marketing.

How do you keep your customers coming back - and get them to bring others? This collection of HBR articles helps you: turn angry customers into loyal advocates; get more people to recommend you; boost customer satisfaction by satisfying your employees; and, focus on profitable customers - whether they're loyal or not.

Do you have a friend that always seems to be flying around the world in First Class and wonder how? Maybe you already know about "frequent flyer miles" but don't know how to get them yourself. Dave Grossman has been "that friend" for years and shares all of his secrets in this must-read for anyone with big travel dreams on a small budget.

"And you thought the passengers were mad. Airline employees are fed up, too-with pay cuts, increased workloads and management's miserly ways, which leave workers to explain to often-enraged passengers why flying has become such a miserable experience."—New York Times, December 22, 2007When both an industry's workers and its customers report high and rising frustration with the way they are being treated, something is fundamentally wrong. In response to these conditions, many of the world's airlines have made ever-deeper cuts in services and their workforces. Is it too much to expect airlines, or any other enterprise, to provide a fair return to investors, high-quality reliable service to their customers, and good jobs for their employees?Measured against these three expectations, the airline industry is failing. In the first five years of the twenty-first century alone, U.S. airlines lost a total of $30 billion while shedding 100,000 jobs, forcing the remaining workers to give up over $15 billion in wages and benefits. Combined with plummeting employee morale, shortages of air traffic controllers, and increased congestion and flight delays, a total collapse of the industry may be coming. Is this state of affairs inevitable? Or is it possible to design a more sustainable, less volatile industry that better balances the objectives of customers, investors, employees, and the wider society? Does deregulation imply total abrogation of government's responsibility to oversee an industry showing the clear signs of deterioration and increasing risk of a pending crisis?Greg J. Bamber, Jody Hoffer Gittell, Thomas A. Kochan, and Andrew von Nordenflycht explore such questions in a well-informed and engaging way, using a mix of quantitative evidence and qualitative studies of airlines from North America, Asia, Australia, and Europe. Up in the Air provides clear and realistic strategies for achieving a better, more equitable balance among the interests of customers, employees, and shareholders. Specifically, the authors recommend that firms learn from the innovations of companies like Southwest and Continental Airlines in order to build a positive workplace culture that fosters coordination and commitment to high-quality service, labor relations policies that avoid long drawn-out conflicts in negotiating new agreements, and business strategies that can sustain investor, employee, and customer support through the ups and downs of business cycles.

The world's commercial aviation industry comprises a complex and highly diverse range of businesses with different forms of governance, ownership, management structure and organisational philosophies. The essays in this Volume address issues of market structure, focusing particularly on changes in the aviation industry that have resulted from policies of deregulation, as well as revenue, cost and pricing, airline mergers and acquisitions and the reasons for and characteristics of global airline alliances. One of the most significant developments in aviation business strategy over the last four decades has been the emergence and expansion of low cost carriers and the implications that this business model has had for the sector in terms of competition, route offering, service innovation and profitability. Central to these discussions are issues of cost and the need to manage yields. This raises the issue of pricing, elasticity, and price discrimination, all of which are of relevance to passenger airlines, air cargo operators and airports. Policies of air service deregulation and liberalisation have fundamentally changed the market structure of airlines and airports. As a result of new airlines entering the market place, many incumbent carriers sought to protect and grow their market share by reconfiguring their network into a hub and spoke operation and merging with, or acquiring their competitors. Another strategy airlines can use to increase their network presence, market power, and obtain enhanced economies of scale and scope is to enter into a strategic alliance with another carrier. Membership of an alliance enables a firm to access new markets that would previously have been difficult and/or expensive to operate into and help to overcome (at least in part) ownership restrictions, a lack of traffic rights to a particular country and markets with limited demand. Deregulation and liberalisation have also changed the competitive nature of the airline market and led to a change in the ownership and control of airports and airlines with many moving from the public to the private sector. The increasingly competitive and contestable market, combined with commercial imperatives to generate a return on investment, means that airlines and airports are incentivised to grow their business through marketing and enhanced customer loyalty. Airlines helped to pioneer the development of customer loyalty schemes and the resulting frequent flyer programmes have become a standard aspect of many full service airline operators' product offerings. However, increased competition and business model innovation have prompted a reconfiguration of these schemes with some low cost operators now incorporating elements of frequent flyer schemes.

This book provides in-depth empirical reports on specific topics within five general areas of tourism management and marketing: (1) scanning and sense making; (2) planning; (3) implementing; (4) evaluating actions/process and performance outcomes; and (5) administering. Offering descriptions, tools and examples of tourism management decision making, the book is useful for students in tourism and management and for tourism executives. It has 27 chapters and a subject index.