Customer Reviews

EasyJet: The Story of England's Biggest Low-Cost Airline

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"EasyJet: The Story of England's Biggest Low-Cost Airline" is a delightful book that those interested in the growing low cost airline phenomenon worldwide will enjoy reading. EasyJet is the largest and successful low cost airline based at Luton Airport near London. The airline operates frequent scheduled services for leisure and business passengers and serves more than 200 routes between more than 65 European airports. Its founder is the Greek Cypriot entrepreneur Stelios Haji-Ioannou.

The airline business is modelled around the successful no frills formula that has been brilliantly employed for over a generation by Southwest Airlines in the USA and its nearby rival Ryanair, based in Ireland. EasyJet and Ryanair are the largest low cost airlines in Europe, The airline started operations in November 1995. EasyJet can operate low cost flights because of its low operating costs. The airline achieves this by, among other things, flying to and from airports that offer cheaper take-off and landing fees, eliminating free meals and drinks during flights, using online and telephone booking systems to eliminate travel agent commissions, flying more often than traditional carriers, not allocating specific seats to passengers (free seating to speed up the passenger boarding process) and competing with all transport modes (especially road and railway transport).

The airline also typically opens new routes with no competition from legacy carriers and tends to target the price conscious business, leisure and visiting friends and relatives passengers. It has an aggressive marketing and pricing strategy and focus on short and medium haul traffic with high frequency of services. The airline has a strong brand.

EasyJet initially operated exclusively Boeing 737 aircraft to minimise costs. However, in September 2003 it broke with its philosophy of operating just one aircraft type, a typical strategy by low cost airlines worldwide, by ordering 120 Airbus A319 aircraft. When the last of the Airbus A319s has been delivered in 2007 easyJet is expected to have retired most of its Boeing 737 fleet.

So this is the story of easyJet, which Lois Jones related with rigour and eloquence.

Air travel in the United States was heavily regulated for many, many years. Then deregulation came and the era of inexpensive air travel came in. In Europe it was a much bigger mess. Most of the airlines were owned by the Government and had enough pull within the Government to make it difficult for new airlines to enter their protected territory.

easyJet has been able to carve a business out of the European market. Sometimes it has used, shall we say, 'creative' techniques. For instance, in trying to restrict entry into the market and protect SwissAir, the Swiss attempted to stop them by citing an obscure rule that said that that they had to offer accommodations with their tickets. easyJet's president had a tent errected on a hillside nearby and said that any passenger who wanted accommodations were welcome to stay there.

The story of easyJet is the story of our modern time as the rules of international business are changing dramatically. Indeed the whole rise of the no-frills airlines has been an interesting addition to the conventional airlines. The success of easyJet also proves that all new businesses don't have to be high-tech to succeed. There are still fortunes to be made in the more mundane businesses. The story of easyJet has lessons in it for all of us in business. As business becomes more world wide, any business needs to look at international expansion. The easyJet story is one involving a large number of countries and they did it in a different way.