From technology to business strategy
The first seven decades of air travel was marked above all by the development of faster and more reliable aviation technology. Commercially, air travel was within the reach of comparably few people in the early decades of its history. With the coming of jet aircraft that flew faster and further, greater numbers of ordinary people took to the air. Intercontinental travel on a big scale was given a boost when large, wide-bodied aircraft began to fly.
From the 1920s to the Second World War, Finnair flew mainly in the Baltic region and focused on building a domestic network. After the war, it was time to connect Finland by air to the rest of Europe. Later, in the 1970s, Finnair began long-haul services by opening routes to North America. That decade was also a time of strong growth in leisure travel. Now, this millennium has started with a significant investment in Asian traffic.
Since the 1970s the business strategy dimension of air transport, both in America and in Europe, has posed been a greater challenge to operators than technical development. Through the liberalization of air transport, large national organizations, such as airlines, airports and providers of air traffic control services, have become commercial enterprises.
In Europe, state-owned airlines learned in the final decades of last century to operate according to business principles as they were exposed to competition and their ownership base was extended beyond state ownership into the free market.
Just as aerodynamic lift enabled an aircraft's wings to fly one hundred years ago, air transport in this millennium needs a new business dynamic, which even the established icons of aviation need in order to obtain an upward boost. An organization's capacity to adapt and produce services competitively in terms of price and quality is a vital requirement. Understanding customers' needs and the ability to fulfil them will be the prerequisites for success in the skies of future. |