A Study On The Development Of Foreign Low Cost Carriers

With the continuous improvement of people's living standards and the increase of their leisure time, the global tourism industry has been growing vigorously, and the six basic tourism elements of "food, accommodation, transportation, sightseeing, shopping and entertainment" have also undergone great changes. As an important element in tourism, transportation has gradually become the focus of people's attention. More and more people began to choose air travel as their travel mode, thus greatly expanding their travel distance and shortening the time for transportation. At the same time, the change of people's travel mode also brings enormous changes for commercial air transport industry.In the 1970s, Southwest Airlines' first flight in Texas broke the balance of American air transport market which had been controlled by large network airlines for a long time. During the ensuing decades, many countries and regions led by the US gradually relaxed their governmental control over air traffic, which speed up the formation of market-oriented aviation industry. A large number of low-cost carriers were founded and participated into the more and more fierce competition in the market. At the beginning of 21st century, as the continuous expansion of China's aviation market and the gradual relaxation of air traffic control, low-cost carriers came up in China's aviation market and began to develop, such as Spring Airlines, Shenzhen Airlines and Lucky Air, which have already entered the development path of low-cost carriers. Though low-cost carriers showed up quite late in China, the appearance of low-cost carriers finally let us see the hope of the development of low-cost carriers in our country. Under such background, this paper chose foreign low-cost carriers as the object of study, and mainly inquired into such problems as below:First, this paper describes the development status of foreign airlines from the macro perspective, combs the development history of foreign low-cost carriers and summarizes their operational features.Second, the paper discusses the influence of the development of low-cost carriers on foreign commercial aviation industry from the perspective of airline industry, specifically their influence on guest markets, market structure and business strategies of airlines.Third, the paper reviews low-cost carriers from the micro-level. Through the anatomy of Southwest Airline, the paper systematically analyzes the formation of value chain in low-cost airlines, and tries to verify the feasibility and correctness of its business strategy through analyzing its breakthrough and achievement in its expansion of company size, financial performance, carrying capacity and operating efficiency.Fourth, drawing on international experiences in the development of low-cost carriers, this paper considers the development strategy of low-cost airlines in China based on our own status quo of aviation industry.This study includes five sections as following: Chapter I: Introduction. Chapter II: The development and basic characteristics of foreign low-cost carriers. Chapter III: The influence of foreign low-cost carriers on air transport market. Chapter IV: The analysis on business strategy and performance of foreign low-cost carriers. Chapter V: Enlightenment and prospect.