Airline Marketing and Management [Paperback]

The Fourth Edition is an updated and important text for people with whom need basic principles in marketing and management explained as it applies to the airline industry.

Airline Marketing and Management is a gem because it carefully breaks down major marketing and promotion concepts all the way down to smaller segments with great examples.

This book is a classic. Readers will get an indepth understanding of aviation and, surprisingly, why the airline industry is still in shambles today. It covers the intricacies of product design and development, pricing and revenue management, pricing and revenue management, distribution channels, and selling and advertising policies.

Many of the "tried and proven time after time" principles are, for the most part, still ignored by airline managers today. The author is diligent in his effort to examine "time-proven principles."

This is a marketing book about the fundamentals. Can't move on until you got them down!

Airline Marketing and Management is a fascinating book about modern marketing and management in airlines. It approaches this interesting subject in a practical and easy-to-follow way. The airline business has many unique features that Stephen Shaw expertly managed to blend with the basic theory and concepts of marketing. This makes the book an excellent introduction to the field of airline marketing and management.

The reader is introduced to the principles of marketing and their practical application in the current highly dynamic and competitive airline environment. Among the important areas I enjoyed the most are product strategies, pricing, distribution and promotion in the industry, regulatory developments, the implications of low cost carriers to the industry and strategic alliances.

As a player in the airline industry, I am now knowledgeable about building and managing profitable customer relationships, how to study customer needs and wants, selecting target markets, how to attract, retain and grow customers by providing superior value and satisfaction. I highly recommend this book to those wishing to gain a basic understanding of the airline industry.

This book describes the principles of marketing in the airline industry from basic strategy, pricing, CRM, distribution to brands and advertisement. Shaw concentrates on the general principles of the airline industry. The author's approach is formal, he discusses each marketing task chapter by chapter, but his writing style is engaging and it is always interesting - at least for people who are not insiders. This approach has many advantages. Its formal structure makes it easy for the novice reader to navigate through the book and recall what one has learned. The writing is concise and theoretically sound. This book presents no anecdotes and irrelevant story telling, no exceptional success stories or failures that cannot be generalized. For instance, he describes Southwest Airlines as a very successful low cost strategy that has been successfully copied throughout the world by other low cost airlines. This strategy works because of the cost characteristics, the barriers to entry in the airline industry and the problems of traditional national carriers to copy a similar strategy. Other more idiosyncratic characteristics of Southwest (`relational coordination') are omitted here, because their impact on the airline's success is not theoretically clear. This is the difference between a scholarly approach and a typical business book.

This and the clear structure and writing style make this book ideal as teaching material. It can be used as an extensive case study or each chapter can be used individually as an application of the textbook marketing lessons to the airline industry. You'll find a lot of the basic textbook concepts in this book such as the Porter model, the Boston matrix and the Ansoff matrix, etc. Another advantage is that the book covers the world market and not only one part of the world. I often come across books that claim to explain "The XY industry" yet discuss exclusively the situation in the US market. On the downside: Shaw does not go beyond these simple models and it never gets quantitative. For instance there is no quantitative model for fare pricing. In general, there is little quantitative data presented, although the two tables about the cost structure of an airline included are especially interesting. A clear disadvantage is the almost total lack of literature references and further readings. Shaw expresses clearly his own ideas but he never mentions that other writers might have different views on a particular issue.

Overall, this book is a good example for an informative description of an industry. Other authors who want to write about a specific industry should use this as a kind of blueprint. Too many typos for a 5th edition though.