No Frills: The Truth Behind the Low Cost Revolution in the Skies

Rating:
Summary: Trench Warefare
Review: Calder does a great job in describing the dramatic revolution taking place in the European skies. For Americans that have witnessed the turmoil that a single efficient operator (Soutwest Airlines) has unleashed on an otherwise inefficient industry, this book is especially interesting.
The skies of Europe are deregulated, the gloves are off, and the names are changing.

Rating:
Summary: Something Special in the Air: No-Frills Competition
Review: Having lived and worked in Dallas since 1976, I am among those who heavily depend upon Southwest Airlines for both business and personal airline transportation, and, who feel great respect as well as affection for its former CEO, Herb Kelleher. It was thus with special interest, indeed eagerness that I began to read Calder's book in which he carefully examines each of those European airlines which are obviously in great debt (both philosophically and operationally) to "Herb" and his unique airline. It is important to remember, however, that imitation may be the highest form of flattery but there is far more involved in approximating Southwest's success than many may assume. According to Kelleher, "You can get the same airplane. You can get the same ticket counters.  You can get the same computers. But the hardest thing for a competitor to match is your culture and the spirit of your people and their focus on customer service because that isn't something you can do overnight and it isn't something you can do without a great deal of attention every day in a thousand different ways. That is why I say that our employees are our competitive protection."

That is precisely why David Neeleman and his JetBlue associates continue to commit so much of their resources to identifying, interviewing, hiring, and then training new "crewmembers," NOT "employees" nor even "associates." Long before Neeleman went to work for Southwest, he recalls a conversation with Kelleher. According to Neeleman, Kelleher said "I don't care about my shareholders." Neeleman was shocked. What did he mean? Was Kelleher really serious? "Because I just take care of my employees. I know if I take care of my employees, they'll take care of my customers, and my customers will take care of my shareholders." Presumably Michael O'Leary (then deputy chief executive of Ryanair) has comparable memories of his own conversations with Kelleher, especially during his (O'Leary's) visit in Dallas (1991). As he explained to Calder during one of several interviews, "Once we saw what Southwest was doing we thought this could be the way forward. We're imitating Southwest: selling at the lowest possible price to the maximum number of people. We've been replicating that successful formula now for the last twelve years with tremendous success." It is noteworthy that in 1991, Ryanair was (in O'Leary's own words)
" hovering on the verge of bankruptcy. In Spring 1991 I thought it would be a miracle if we were still in business three months later." In 2001, Ryanair was more valuable than the biggest airline in the world.

In this volume Calder, explains how that extraordinary turnaround was accomplished. He also examines with equal rigor other airlines and their CEOs, revealing sometimes similar but often different strategies and tactics with which they compete against each other during what Calder characterizes as "the low-cost revolution in the skies" above the UK and continental Europe. All of these airlines (e.g. Ryanair, easyJet, Buzz, Go) have obviously been influenced by "the Southwest way." That said, of greatest interest and value to me is how extensively Calder takes his reader "behind the scenes, where the decisions that change the way we travel are taken, and scores are settled." The reader may conclude that "the no-frills runway is more like a school playground; but to traditional airlines, and even some train operators, the no-frills carriers represent a potentially deadly threat." It will be interesting to see which of the no-frills airlines throughout Europe and Asia prosper, which struggle, and which fail. It will also be interesting to see how the traditional airlines respond to the on-going, always volatile, and inevitably unpredictable "revolution" now in progress. Perhaps Calder will share his thoughts about all this in another book which (obviously) cannot be written for several years.

Those who enjoy this book as much as I did are urged to check out Kevin Freiberg and Jackie Freiberg's Nuts!: Southwest Airlines' Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success, James Wynbrandt's Flying High: How JetBlue Founder and CEO David Neeleman Beats the Competition, Jody Hoffer Gittell's The Southwest Airlines Way: Using the Power of Relationships to Achieve High Performance, and Gordon Bethune's From Worst to First: Behind the Scenes of Continental's Remarkable Comeback.