Southwest Airlines 1998 Annual Report Download - page 15

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15
SOUTHWEST AIRLINES CO. ¤ SIX STORIES OF FREEDOM
“We give our People the freedom to build schedules
that ensure our Customers have the flexibility to fly
where they want to fly, when they want to fly there.”
— Gary A. Barron, Executive Vice President — Chief Operations Officer
Southwest offers lots of daily flights to the cities we serve. That’s the “high frequency”
part of our shorthaul, low-fare, high-frequency strategy. It helps keep our asset
utilization high and, therefore, our unit cost low. But, more importantly, it offers
convenience, especially to our business Customers. Our operation was built to meet
the needs of the shorthaul business traveler.
Currently, we operate over 2,300 daily flights, or almost 45 departures per airport. In
fact, we have seven airports with over 100 flights per day. This is very different from our
major hub-and-spoke airline competitors, which offer lots of flights from just a few hub
cities. We offer numerous flights almost everywhere we serve.
With our shorthaul and efficiency focus, we schedule our aircraft on a point-to-point,
rather than hub-and-spoke, basis. Consequently, approximately 75 percent of our
Customers fly nonstop, in sharp contrast to the rest of the industry where many
passengers connect.
Southwest’s point-to-point route system, as compared to hub-and-spoke, provides our
Customers with extensive nonstop routings that minimize connections, delays, and
travel time. Because of our high frequencies and high productivity, our airport
turnaround time is minimal and leads the industry at approximately 20 minutes. So, for
the 25 percent of our Customers who don’t fly us nonstop, ground time and, therefore,
total trip time is minimized.