Tale of the Tagues: An Airline Story, Part 2
[Read first » Tale of the Tagues: An Airline Story, Part 1]
After his first departure from ATA, John Tague and two partners started The Pointe Group, an airline consulting firm with presence in both New York and suburban Washington, D.C. Tague’s only two consulting engagements as an ex-ATA executive were short, almost simultaneous, and quite unusual. At the request of a west coast investment bank, he became the consulting CEO for two ailing regional airlines: Air South, based in Columbia, South Carolina and, a few months later, Vanguard Airlines, based in Kansas City, Missouri.
It wasn’t clear to industry observers at the time how a single CEO was going to simultaneously nurse back to health two struggling airlines that were located 850 miles apart. One analyst, George Hamlin of Global Aviation Systems in Washington, D.C., likened the airlines’ plight to “two drunks staggering down the street trying to hold each other up.”
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The Strategic and the Myopic
While United applies itself to the important problem of insufficient employee load factor on Chicago-area expressways, the number three airline in Denver (Southwest) is spending strategically to acquire its number two competitor (Frontier) and move within single digits of United’s market share in that important western hub.
Southwest EVP Ron Ricks explains the anticipated “Southwest Effect” in Denver, including expected impacts on Frontier’s employees, in the company’s blog on last Friday:
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