Cruising through the strategy changes - keeping calm and maximising revenue?

Abstract

Although strategy implementation as a field of research has interested number of researchers already for several decades, consistent framework to implement strategies in organizations still doesn’t exist. Research data from the field shows that many organizations fail to communicate their employees which aspects matters the most for the company and the awareness of strategies has been on a poor level in many organizations over the past decades.

During the past years, global aviation industry has faced unexpected events first in terms of Covid-19 pandemic followed by Russian airspace closure. To adapt into major changes in its operating environment, the case airline in the focus of this study redefined its strategy during autumn 2022. Revenue Management and Pricing (RMP) unit is part of airline’s Commercial Business Unit with ultimate goal of maximizing passenger revenue in the entire airline’s network. Together with recent changes in the operating environment, also technological advancements have reformed RMP organization over the past years. In 2021 survey results had revealed that goals and targets on RMP department and their connection to strategy would need clarification and the ways and means to follow-up performance and KPIs needed improvement.

In the light of recent major changes in case airline’s company strategy and business environment, this study’s objective was to examine how strategy implementation practices are perceived today by the employees in RMP department. Research was conducted as a descriptive case study with mixed methods methodology and the data was collected through an online questionnaire which was sent to selected participants on RMP department. As the collected data included both quantitative and qualitative data, principal component analysis and thematic analysis were applied on data analyses. The results of earlier questionnaire from 2021 were also used to compare the development where applicable in relation to findings of this study.

The study indicates that there are three broad themes impacting the experience how strategy implementation at RMP department is perceived. These themes involve the discussion of strategy, its execution and strategic priorities, structure of the organization in terms of cooperation and understanding the efforts towards common goals as well as internal and cross-organizational understanding and alignment of targets. For many individuals in RMP the strategy is most visible through striving towards the set targets and in the department whose ultimate goal is to maximize revenue, having such targets that are motivating is utmost important. Cooperation both internally and with stakeholders inside the business unit was found important but also as a factor which was lacking into some extent in terms of contributing to common goals.

Based on the findings certain areas have already improved since the findings of 2021 survey, but also many practical recommendations for further improvement were found. Findings also revealed topics outside the scope of this study but which are likely to be relevant factors on how the overall experience of the strategy implementation is perceived; these topics generated suggestions for future research.