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Company Interview Excerpt
Alaska Air Group, Inc. - William S. Ayer


Full article published: 11/23/2009


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TWST: Please start with a brief history of Alaska Air.
Mr. Ayer: The parent company and the publicly traded company is Alaska Air Group, and we have two principal subsidiaries, Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air. Together we provide passenger air service to about 24 million passengers a year. And we also provide freight and mail service primarily to, from and within the state of Alaska and the West Coast. Looking at the two subsidiaries separately, Alaska is a 77-year-old company at this point. We started in the state of Alaska in 1932; we grew to become a carrier flying pretty much up and down the West Coast. We added Mexico to the network in the 1980s, and then following 9/11, the most dramatic change to our route map was going to east/west out of Seattle. Our major cities are Seattle, obviously, and Anchorage, and also Portland, the Bay Area and the L.A. Basin. We operate an all-737 fleet, and that's a new fleet over the last couple of years. We moved out of the MD-80s, so we're all 737s. And in terms of what the company is known for, I think it's customer service and innovation. We were the first airline to offer reservation sales over the Internet back in 1995. We were the first to have a wide-scale deployment in our airports of kiosks and offer Web check-in to our customers. And more recently we have been developing what we call the "airport of the future," which we opened up in Seattle here a couple of years ago, which is a sort of a non-ticket counter approach. It's a flow-through design for customers to get their boarding pass if they didn't get it at home and then basically flow through the process, checking bags and getting on through security. We have done that both in Anchorage and Seattle, and it's been met with great praise from our customers. It really speeds up the process and lets them stay in control of the check-in. The airport process can be a stressful thing for people, so we try to understand our customers' point of view and design things that work really well for them. Then if we look at Horizon real quickly, Horizon is a 27-year-old company; it was founded here in Seattle in 1981. It's a wholly owned regional, which there aren't many of. It has a strong, separate brand. Most of the major carriers, if they've acquired regional carriers, they've just made them XYZ express - they painted the airplanes like their own, and they haven't kept a separate brand. In Horizon's case, we kept it separate because it already had a strong brand before it was acquired by Alaska Air Group. Horizon operates Q400 turboprops, they're 76-seat airplanes, and regional jets, which are 70-seat aircraft. And its strong cities are Seattle and Portland. Horizon has had recent growth into California, Northern and Southern California, and some of that is substituting for larger Alaska airplanes with smaller airplanes because that makes more economic sense. All told, we have about 13,000 employees between the two companies.

 

Tickers included in this excerpt: ALK

 

For more information call (212) 952 7433. The Wall Street Transcript does not endorse any of the comments made by interviewees, and does not make stock recommendations.