Business And Business Environment Assignment Help

Introduction

Business organizations are of many types. Organisations can be private limited run by a sole trader or in partnership. They can also be for profit organisations or for non-profit organisations. Companies could also belong to the public limited group which is essentially governmental organizations run for the benefit of public. These companies together establish mixed economy; which is a type of economy where both the private companies and governmental organisations exist to run the economy keeping in mind the welfare of the general public (Simões et al. 2016, p.3330).

This part of the report represents two companies; one from the private sector namely Titan airways; which are a UK based Charter Airline Company and public limited company namely British airways which are run by British government. A thorough analysis of both companies will be done to understand the business trends and business environment.

British Airways

1. 1. Company overview

British Airways (BA) is based in Waterside UK is a public limited governmental airline company; main hub based in London Heathrow Airport. It is the largest British airline company according to fleet size and b passenger size it is the second largest one in UK. After the civil aviation act passed in1971, the UK government established a British Airways Board in 1972 so that British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) and British European Airways (BEA) could be managed. Afterwards in 31st March 1974, British Airways was established. Apart from its primary base in London Heathrow Airport British Airways also has its presence in Gatwick Airport and London City Airport.  BA owns 40% of the slots of the London Heathrow Airport where the majority of the services run from terminal 5 with the small exceptions of terminal 1 and 3. Over the years of its existence the airline company has seen a few ups and downs. In 2011 BA merged with Iberia forming one of the world’s largest International Airline group (Britishairways.com. 2017).

2. 2. Services Offered

British Airways offers two types of flying services as of 2016. These are Fleet and cargo fleet. In addition BA serves about 160 destinations n the world including six domestic destinations (Britishairways.com. 2017).  

Fleets

As of 2016, BA consists of about 268 Fleets in service. Below the chart of fleets are provided.

Aircraft	In service	Orders
Airbus A318-100	2
Airbus A319-100	44
Airbus A320-200	68
Airbus A320neo		25
Airbus A321-200	18
Airbus A321neo		10
Airbus A350-1000		18
Airbus A380-800	12
Boeing 747-400	37
Boeing 767-300ER	7
Boeing 777-200	3
Boeing 777-200ER	43
Boeing 777-300ER	12
Boeing 787-8	8	4
Boeing 787-9	14	4
Boeing 787-10		12
Total	268	73

Cargo Fleet

British Airways World Cargo was the freight division of the cargo before they merged with Iberia to form IAG cargo division. In 2014 IAG entered into an agreement with Qatar Airways so that Qatar Airways can operate flights for IAG using Qatar’s Boeing 77F (Britishairways.com. 2017).

3. 3. Size of the Organisation

The total number of people (Pilots) associated and working for BA until 2015 is 42322. A total of 15907 is working for British Airways as of 2015. The gross annual revenue at the end of 2015 is €m11,333 with a profit of €m1264 and in the year 2016 the revenue and profit further raised to £m11,443 and £m1,473 respectively (Lawton et al. 2013). The number of passengers using BA as of 2015 stands for 43.3 million and in 2016 it rose to 44.5 million. The percentage passenger load factor stands for 43.3% (British Airways., 2017).

4. 4. Industrial relations

British Airways has codeshares agreement between the following Airlines.

1. Aer Lingus
2. Air Berlin
3. air Baltic
4. American Airlines
5. Bangkok Airways
6. Cathay Pacific
7. China Eastern
8. Finnair
9. Flybe
10. Iberia
11. Japan Airlines
12. LATAM Brazil
13. LATAM Chile
14. Qantas
15. Qatar Airways
16. Royal Jordanian
17. S7 Airlines
18. TAAG Angola Airlines
19. Vueling

BA City Flyer is a subsidiary of BA which operates flights from its base on London City Airport. After the establishment of Open Skies agreement in between Europe and the United States, British Airways established another new supplementary airline called Open-Skies which were formerly known as "Project Lauren". In June 2008, the airline started functions and as of now provides flights direct from Paris to New York's JFK and Newark airports (Lange et al. 2015, p.389).

5. 5. Business objectives

Their business objective statement is “Meeting the rising expectations of our customers’ remains central to our strategy of transforming British Airways into the world’s leading global premium airline. Our investment in our staff, our fleet and our facilities are all about making sure we provide the very best in customer service. We want all of our customers to enjoy a premium service at every point of their journey, whenever and wherever they travel with us.” (British Airways, 2017)

According to this statement the British airway thrives to become not only UK’s but world’s best airline service. They target to be the best in the industry while meeting their customers’’ growing expectations. In every step of the way they aim to provide all their customers premium services. In general the prime objective of the company is to become the number one airline company in the world with its international collaborations by serving their customers with supreme quality and services (British Airways Plc., 2017).

6. 6. Organisational structure

Source: (Titan-airways.com. 2017)

The chart over states the names of the heads of the departments and are the pillars of the British airways as of 2015. The departments along with the names are specified. In the beginning of 2015 the organizations introduced some changes in the organisational structure. In 2016 Alex Cruz took over as the new CEO. It is expected that the new CEO will be implementing cost cutting measures that will result in the de-layering of the organisational structure. The unique organisational structure of the British airways is led by a general manager who works directly under the CEO. The general manager is answered by the other division and subdivision managers. The general manager is answerable to the board of directors. The branches of the divisions are led by branch managers. Branches include imports, customer service, finance, marketing sales and HR.