<\/p>\n
Southwest had a rough going over the past few months, but CEO Bob Jordan says he has a plan. The Southwest experience may not look too different from other airlines.<\/p>\n
Elliott Investment Management tried leveraging its activist stake in Southwest Airlines to push CEO Bob Jordan out \u2013 but Jordan is still in charge. Now, he is unpacking how Southwest plans to keep up with competing airlines.<\/p>\n
At Tuesday\u2019s Skift Aviation Forum, Jordan said he thinks \u201cthat chapter is closed\u201d with Elliott.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cYou get feedback from your shareholders, not just Elliott,\u201d Jordan said. \u201cAnd the feedback was clear. We needed to continue our board refresh.\u201d<\/p>\n
Five of Elliott\u2019s director picks joined Southwest\u2019s board, and former chairman Gary Kelly left.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Jordan said changes have been underway at Southwest for a while, but Elliott sped up the process. \u201cSouthwest Airlines will return to industry-leading profitability,\u201d Jordan said.<\/p>\n
On top of considering customer preferences, the company ran simulations to evaluate how certain adjustments would impact boarding times.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is by far the deepest set of research that we have ever done,\u201d Jordan said.<\/p>\n
Assigned seats and extra legroom are a big selling point for passengers. Jordan said 86% of customers who don\u2019t choose Southwest do so because of these concerns.<\/p>\n
These seating adjustments, airline partnerships and red-eye flights may be standard on other airlines but are all part of Southwest\u2019s agenda to keep pace.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of customers love red-eyes, but what it does for you on the efficiency side is it just makes the aircraft utilization even higher, makes our people more efficient,\u201d Jordan said.<\/p>\n
One other change: going paperless in the cockpit and cabin, a transition airlines have made in the past decade.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we had an offline diversion into an airport that Southwest Airlines does not serve\u2026 because we were paper based, you had to go find someone with a printer to reprint the new dispatch and dispatch release paperwork, the fueling paperwork,\u201d Jordan said. \u201cAnd today we go into an offline airport, you punch a button on the iPad and off you go.\u201d<\/p>\n
Another contentious choice: pulling back from Atlanta.<\/p>\n
While the company still offers over 50 flights a day at the world\u2019s busiest passenger airport, it\u2019s shifting its focus to other cities. Jordan is trying to spot mounting demand, noting Austin and Nashville as areas for growth.<\/p>\n
\u201cSouthwest Airlines is going to win, but you do have to pick your battles,\u201d Jordan said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As inflation and labor costs go up, Jordan believes Southwest is still in a good spot.<\/p>\n
\u201cSouthwest Airlines has every one of their labor contracts locked up,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Other airlines have adopted a Southwest strategy: no change fees. But Jordan doesn\u2019t see a threat when it comes to company policies.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have had the industry\u2019s best set of customer-leaning, customer-friendly policies forever,\u201d Jordan said. Some of the policies he mentioned: Southwest\u2019s credits and Rapid Rewards points that don\u2019t expire and no fees for checked bags.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have been the champion for the consumer and the customer from the start, hands down, period,\u201d Jordan said.<\/p>\n
Rephrase in a different way as if you were a native American speaker as a content creation expert and do not talk about yourself or your experience in the text and do not show yourself as an artificial intelligence who wrote and fill the bullet point in the topic and speak the heart of the topic itself and dont take date of blog in ther first and dont take text like box of newsliter subscribe on post from content and romove all linke insert in content and and remove all affiliate disclosure phrases on content like this “This post may contain Amazon or other affiliate links that allow us to earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Please see our Disclosure Policy for more info” and “#” put in its place bullet point, and romove name of the web site or his links we are take a content from our new creation, and don’t publish clone new content more than just one time<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Skift Take Southwest had a rough going over the past few months, but CEO Bob Jordan says he has a plan. The Southwest experience may not look too different from other airlines. Elizabeth Casolo Elliott Investment Management tried leveraging its activist stake in Southwest Airlines to push CEO Bob Jordan out \u2013 but Jordan is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4777,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rank_math_lock_modified_date":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[187],"tags":[3710,940,1786,693,3713,3092,3096,3097,1182,592,2774,1788,234,3095,3712,3093,3088,2534,2366,2773,1995,1789,3711,3094,3098,1055],"class_list":["post-4776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-airlines","tag-activist-investors","tag-american","tag-atlanta","tag-boeing","tag-catchup","tag-characters","tag-content","tag-creation","tag-dont","tag-earnings","tag-elliott","tag-elliott-management","tag-experience","tag-expert","tag-game","tag-native","tag-rephrase","tag-research","tag-saf2024","tag-settlement","tag-skift-aviation-forum-2024","tag-southwest-airlines","tag-southwests","tag-speaker","tag-talk","tag-whats"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4776"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4776\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4778,"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4776\/revisions\/4778"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}