Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air 2007 Annual Report Download - page 5

We promise to provide an exceptional customer
experience that is safe, dependable and delivered
with genuine and caring service.
— Our customer promise
To Our Stockholders
Living up to our promises — something we all
learned when we were young — seems to get
more complicated as we grow up. But regardless
of how difficult it becomes, keeping promises is
essential to the success of any business —
especially to ours.
Our strategic plans at Alaska Airlines and
Horizon Air revolve around living up to our
promises to all our stakeholders. When
customers buy tickets on our airlines, they
expect us to get them where they want to go
safely, on time and with their bags. Our
employees trust us to provide good jobs with fair,
market-based compensation and to make good
on our retirement funding obligations. And we
believe there is an implicit, if not explicit,
promise to provide investors a reasonable return
over the long term. Keeping these core promises
is foundational to our future success.
But let’s be frank. We haven’t always delivered.
Our industry as a whole has struggled and some
airlines have outright failed to live up to their
promises over the past few years. There are
plenty of excuses to go around, but to customers
who missed important meetings or family
Bill Ayer, Chairman and CEO
gatherings, employees forced to change major
life plans because they lost a portion of their
hard-earned retirement incomes, and
stockholders who lost their investments —
excuses simply don’t matter.
While some things, such as soaring fuel prices
and a sluggish economy, are out of our direct
control, we decide how we’re going to respond to
circumstances that present themselves. And it’s
the sum of those decisions that determines our
ultimate success or failure over the long term.
Let’s look at how we performed in 2007 and
what we’re doing in 2008 to better position
ourselves to live up to our promises.
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