Southwest Airlines CEO: Biggest Issue for Travel Recovery Is Still Pilots
byDaniel McCarthy/
鲍勃·乔丹(Bob Jordan)于2月1日接任该航空公司历史上的第六位首席执行官,大约是前首席执行官加里·C·凯利(Gary C. Kelly)宣布退休的七个月。在此之前,他在西南航空工作了30多年,担任15个不同的角色,从计算机程序员(他开始的角色)到旅行社会计总监。
Speaking on Thursday at the ASTA Global Convention in San Francisco, Jordan said “it’s a joy a privilege to be able to be in a role for a company that you love,” despite him being a “reluctant CEO.”
“A lot of people aspire to be in this job their whole career…I have always enjoyed work…but I wouldn’t say I have ever been real career-focused,” he said. “When the company you love asked you to do a job, you step up and do that.”
Southwest is still dealing with post-pandemic challenges, but things are improving.
根据约旦的说法,西南航空现在的人员现在是同一水平,在经过数月的大量招聘之后,它是在大流行之前的。目前,该航空公司以每月1,500人的比率雇用,其中包括过去12个月的13,200人,逐年11,000。为了进行比较,一年中有7,000个是大传统的高潮。
The issue for Southwest, and for so many of its competitors in the aviation industry, is the difficulty finding and training pilots, a position that is obviously crucial to its operations.
据长期航空公司分析师Helane Becker称spoke to Yahoo at the end of 2021,该行业在未来十年内可能需要35,000至40,000名新飞行员,以抵消退休并保持旅行需求的步伐。现在,该行业的任务是寻找和培训那些飞行员,这一团队将不仅对行业蓬勃发展,而且要继续扩展至关重要。
“We are not there with our pilots,” he said. “The limiter is capacity—we have limited capacity to train our pilots…that is the issue right now.”
更多与旅行交易的参与
约旦是本周在全球大会上出现在舞台上的唯一航空公司首席执行官,这对于像西南航空这样的航空公司来说是很长的路要走。与其他载体相比,西南航空历史上已经采取了不同的成功路线,包括不通过ARC报告其预订。
“我们有一个长期以来认为……长期存在的方式that we weren’t going to participate in most of the standard ways to do things generally,” he said.
西南航空的最后十年左右的增长,再加上迅速变化的旅行景观,使它重新考虑了事情。
“At a certain point you get bigger…you have got to have a willingness to challenge our assumptions,” he said. Part of that was a lean into business travel with Southwest Business, a new section of the airline that was unveiled in 2019.
Corporate has been lagging leisure in the post-pandemic recovery not just for Southwest, but for the entire airline industry and the larger travel industry as a whole. For Southwest, the leisure business for summer 2022 is already 20% ahead of the same period in 2019, but that doesn’t mean that corporate travel is dead.
乔丹说:“无论是否是这个话题,您都会发现,当有人说'它已经结束时,它已经永远改变了',那就是它的变化时间。”“商业企业正在落后[休闲],但仍然恢复了。我们会回到100%吗?这很难预测。”
But, more relevant for advisors in attendance at ASTA Global Convention, it also includes a growing outreach to the travel trade, a portion of its business that is now just under 50% of its total sales.
“You can’t ignore that as a place for revenue,” he said. “We have the best network, the best frequencies, we serve the most cities, we have terrific hospitality and on-time performance, that is what business customers want so we have to be in the right place,” which is the travel trade, he said.
“I think a brighter future is in front of all of us. People want to travel – we are going to see a continued recovery here.