Westjet 2005 Annual Report Download - page 8

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6
YOUR OWNERS’ MANUAL
The fourth quarter of 2005 presented another round of
challenges with the impacts that our industry faced from
the worst hurricane season in living memory. This not only
led to major damage to the refineries and oil and gas
infrastructure on the US gulf coast, which drove the price
of jet fuel to the equivalent of $130 a barrel, but also
caused significant reductions in demand for the markets
of Florida and the Mexican Riviera. These events impacted
our bottom line by at least $11 million in the quarter and
have caused us to plan for the start of this year’s flying into
this region at a later date in the season to mitigate our
exposure to similar events in the future.
During this last year, we also made a number of changes
to our executive and senior management teams in order to
help our company evolve and grow. On September 6, 2005,
we were very pleased to welcome Russ Hall to our team as
Executive Vice-President, Guest Services and Information
Technology, and he is now responsible for the development
of customer and inflight service and IT strategies. On
January 5, 2006, we also appointed Matthew Handford to
the position of Executive Vice-President, People, responsible
for providing leadership to our People (human resources)
team. Fred Ring, who previously held this role, is now
our Executive Vice-President, Corporate Projects. We are
already seeing the positive results from Russ, Matthew
and Fred’s depth of management experience being brought
to our team.
On another positive note, we were very honoured to
be acknowledged for having the most admired corporate
culture in “The 2005 Canadian Corporate Culture Study”
by Canadian Business magazine and Waterstone Human
Capital Ltd. WestJet’s corporate culture was recognized
for its “entrepreneurial spirit,”“delivering what they
promise” and its “winning attitude.”
In this last quarter, we launched scheduled transborder
service from Toronto to Fort Myers and from Vancouver to
Honolulu and Maui. Our launch of these new transborder
markets has been extremely successful, and is particularly
rewarding after the many months of hard work that was
involved in securing the required ETOPS (Extended Range
Twin-Engine Operations) certification in order to operate
to Hawaii.
Profitable growth
in 2005
In 2005, we returned to profitability and
profit share
Despite the sudden rise in jet fuel prices,
we still managed to bring up our yields
We grew our airline by nearly 20% while
increasing load factors and yields