Singapore Airlines: A success story of business strategy

The paper is all about the tourism industry and it specifically focuses on the SWOT analysis for Singapore Airlines

2009

i ABSTRACT The globalisation and deregulation in the air transport industry has resulted in a rapid and massive increase in competition. As a consequence, major airlines around the world have responded by forming strategic global alliances in order to be able to compete effectively on a global basis. Airline brand managers of the airlines participating in these alliances now have the additional responsibility to undertake a task that would have seemed almost impossible a few years before; to promote under a single global brand, very distinctive airline brands. This is further complicated with the subdivision of brand responsibility between increasing numbers of individual airline brand managers with varying degrees of autonomy. Although there have been many studies in identifying different forms of impact that airline alliances have on their members, none of them was in terms of branding. This research investigates the impacts of the individual airline brands of airlines that participate in the global alliances and their alliance brands. In order to achieve this aim, the alliances' and airlinemembers' branding was initially analysed to identify branding consistencies within each global alliance. The second step was to carry out a survey of the airlines' marketing departments to identify the airlines' points of view on the issue. Finally, a survey of passengers identifies their perspective. By comparing the airlines' points of view on their alliance branding (alliance branding strategy) with their websites' marketing (branding strategy implementation) and the passengers' point of view (branding outcome), shortfalls in the alliance branding processes are identified. Moreover, the SERVQUAL model is modified and applied for the airline passenger survey and by carrying out a factor analysis of the survey results, it is identified that the original five dimensions that the items included in the model are designed to correlate with each other are not applicable in the airline industry, but instead the same items are better correlated into four new factors. The key findings of this research are that airline passengers have different service quality expectations among the airlines participating in the same alliances and that their expectations are influenced by the airline that they fly with most regularly. This results in high quality airlines being negatively affected by their lower quality alliance partners. Branding Inconsistencies within the Airline Alliances Cranfield University ii

2008

"Singapore Airlines (SIA) is considered by most experts the best-run airline in the world. Year after year, the company manages to sustain its innovative initiatives and cutting-edge strategies in the face of increasing cost pressures, industry crises, and the constant push towards commoditization. How has SIA outperformed the competition for decades, in a notoriously difficult industry? More importantly, how can you put your own company on the same trajectory? Flying High in a Competitive Industry provides the tools you need to design a strategy that will launch your organization to the forefront of its industry by revealing the secret to SIA’s remarkable success. The company has developed a careful balance of Cost-effective excellence in service, Keen insight into economic trends, Unrivaled ability to recognize corporate misalignment and Extraordinary human resource practices. Flying High in a Competitive Industry gives you the inside secrets for how to outperform the competition at every turn and find vast profits on a consistent basis—even in industries where no one is making money."

During the last decade travel and tourism has assisted the Emirates Group in spreading its wings into every aspect of travel, tourism and business to become the fastest growing corporation in its field. Emirates airlines and Middle East aviation system will face strong challenges with global aviation during the coming years. In the mean while, “the overall growth aspiration of the region demands a high-performing aviation system—including airlines, airports, and air traffic control (ATC)—that in 20 years must successfully serve more than four times the passengers it serves today. However, international benchmarks illustrate that even today’s aviation system does not fulfill current demand. In many Middle East countries, aviation systems’ quality and efficiency levels are well below international levels (e.g., compared to Europe and Asia). Heavy regulation also has resulted in limited service in terms of route frequency and destinations, high customer prices, and a need for high government subsidies to maintain the system.”1 Middle East aviation markets especially United Arab Emirates have set the level for reforming their aviation systems and have started encouraging trading and deregulation of airlines rules. In addition, the Middle airline sector plays a smart role in developing a world-class, such as Qatar Airways (which has a five-star Skytrax ranking) and Emirates Group (which has above-average profitability). “Aviation and transport infrastructure is the fundamental catalyst for the creation of global cities. The UAE’s open skies policy is the cornerstone upon which Dubai built its dynamic air transport hub, which in turn supports the growth of other industry sectors. The growth of Emirates embodies the spirit of competition and free enterprise, which will continue to guide their policies for the benefit of the UAE and of the global community in which they operate.”2 Finally, analyzing Emirates airline challenges through SWOT analysis and comparing it with Lufthansa Group a prove of being very active with Cargo and shipment services and passenger cater through developing there technology and advertise there 40 brands and looking to the needs of the customers. It was very obvious of the strengthen of innovation and creativity of Emirates is much stronger then the weakness and keep in going to hire new employees and buying new plans even during Dubai crisis. After compering Emirates with Lufthansa Group the largest airlines in terms of passenger and second largest airline of fleet aircraft. We will prove that Emirates is the most innovative and the fastest airlines growing in the world since they are 25 years old and Lufthansa 86 years old.

2008

A foundational problem in kernel-based semi-supervised learning is the design of suitable kernels which can properly reflect the underlying data manifold. One of the most well-known semi-supervised kernel learning approaches is the spectral kernel learning methodology which usually tunes the spectra of the graph Laplacian empirically or through optimizing some generalized performance measures. In this study, we proposed a novel approach to do spectral kernel learning based on maximum margin criterion, which is theoretically justified as a more essential semi-supervised kernel learning measure than others, such as kernel target alignment. We have conducted lots of experiments on public data sets, showing promising performance of our scheme.