CasoEasyJetTraducción

In terms of operating efficiency, it means:

Aircraft fly out of low-cost airports. These are normally not the major airport serving any destination and can be some distance from it.
Aircraft are tightly scheduled. They are allowed only 25 minutes to off-load on set of passengers and load another, less than half the time of their scheduled full-fare rivals.
Aircrafts must leave and arriveon time (they will not wait for passengers), and if there are delays they can have horrendus knock-on consequences for the timetable. Nevertheless punctuality is varied, with the low-cost carriers just as good as full-fare airlines on some routes.
There is no "slack" in the system. easyJet admits to having "one and a half planes" worth of spare capacity compared with the dozen planes BA has onstand-by at Gatwick and Heathrow. If something goes wrong with a plane it can lead to cancellations and long delays.
There are fewer cabin crew than full-fare rivals and staff rostering is a major logistical problem.

In terms of customer service, it means:

No "frills" such as free drinks, meals or assigned seats.
There is no compensation for delays or lost baggage.
The low-cost airlinesconcentrate in point-to-point flights, whereas the full-fare airlines tend to concentrate on hub-and-spoke traffic.

easyJet is aggressive in promoting its brand and running advertising promotions to get more "bums on seats". It realizes that its planes must have a high seat occupancy to be economic. To this end it is particularly inventive with pricing, encouraging real bargain hunters onto theless popular flights during the day and promoting early bookings with cheaper fares.
easyJet has been at the forefront of the use of the internet for virtual ticketing, to the point where it now sells most of its tickets over the web. This means it does not have to pay commission to travel agents and check-in van be quicker and more efficient. Its website has been held up as a model for the industryand many have copied it.
However, easyJet does have competition and some airlines are cheaper. Whilst easyJet claims an average price of $45 per 600 kilometres, Ryanair claims $34. This compares to British Airways' price of $110. Interestingly Ryanair has so little faith in its timetable that it advises passengers not to book connecting flights. In 2002 easyJet bought one of its major rivals,Go, with whom it had been in fierce price competition on certain routes, to the point where tickets were being given away with only airport tax to pay. One of the first things easyJet did was to close the Go flights on these routes and restore prices. As well as eliminating competition, the purchase of Go had other strategic reasoning behind it. easyJet was purchasing market share in a fast growingmarket (in 2002 it grew by 60%) where there are economies of scale. They were also buying new routes and landing rights, which can be difficult to secure.
One of the fears about low-cost airlines is that they will be tempted to compromise on safety for the sake of cutting costs. The British Airlines Pilot Association has claimed that pilots of low-cost airlines can be tempted to cut corners toachieve flight timetables. Stelios himself has fuelled the safety debate by expressing doubts about Ryanair's use of 20-year-old planes on some of its routes, pointing out that though they might improve profits in the short term, they put the future of the whole airline at risk in the event of an accident. Ryanair is phasing these planes out and does have an unblemished safety record. But theindustry is all too aware that the low-cost US Airlines, Valuejet, went bankrupt after one of its planes crashed in 1996, killing all 110 people on board. As the Economist says (17 August 2002): "the low-cost airline business is not for the fain-hearted".
In 2002, only seven years after starting the company and still owning 29 percent of easyJet, Stelios realised that he was better suited to being a...