Word: expression
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...fare wars have ultimately been caused by the twin impact of deregulation, which brought price competition to the airlines and allowed nonunion upstarts to flourish, and the recession, which caused traffic to shrink. Result: too many seats chasing too few passengers. No-frills carriers like People Express (see box) and Southwest Airlines are thriving on the competition by holding down costs, but some other small airlines are being squeezed. Air Florida, which had helped spark an earlier round of discounting, lost $64 million in the first nine months of 1982 after Delta and Eastern began matching the fares...
...feisty little carrier with rock-bottom prices has more business than its reservations clerks can handle. At People Express, callers sometimes find themselves talking to President Donald Burr. No wonder Burr is glad to pitch in whereever he can: last month, People flew 357,000 paying customers, a whopping 146% increase over traffic a year...
...months since People Express started up, its home base-a former freight terminal-has become the busiest gateway at Newark International Airport, some 13 miles southwest of New York City. Flying passengers between cities from Boston to Palm Beach and as far west as Columbus, the pint-size airline earned a profit of $27 million in the first nine months of 1982, while the likes of Pan Am, Eastern and TWA were all showing losses. People's progress is mainly due to the lowest operating costs in the business, an average of 5.3? per seat per mile flown...
Burr, 41, formerly president of Texas International Airlines, gives much of the credit to his dedicated staff of 1,200 "racehorse types" who hire on for less and work hard. They have reason to: on the average, People Express workers own $20,000 worth of stock in the company. The onetime schoolteachers, anthropologists and art historians recruited by Burr seem to thrive in a company that has no secretaries or plush offices, and whose chief financial officer, Robert McAdoo, helps serve coffee on some flights. Says McAdoo: "We're all in this together...
...customers keep coming out of the woodwork. Says Burr: "We're getting people who wouldn't have traveled to New York to see a show, or buy clothes. If they did, they would have driven or taken a train." These days, at least on People Express, it is cheaper...