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Horizon Air ranks among the top 10 U.S. regional carriers. Yet it is unique in that it operates as an independent airline, carries about 65 percent of its passengers as "origin and destination' (O&D) traffic, employs a mixed fleet of turboprops and regional jets, and separates its brand from its major code-share partner and sister company, Alaska Airlines. Both are subsidies of Alaska Air Group.
Horizon Air's president, Jeff Pinneo, began his airline career as a flight attendant with Continental in 1977 while attending college at the University of Washington. After graduation, he did a short stint in sales with Evergreen, then moved to Alaska Airlines in 1981, eventually ending up as director of advertising. He moved over to Horizon in 1990 as vice president-customer services and was named president and CEO last January.
C/R News recently checked in with him to find out how he was doing after half a year in the hot seat.
C/R News: After last September, Horizon Air lost a lot of high yield traffic, particularly on the Portland-Seattle Shuttle. What are you doing to get that traffic back?
Pinneo: Short-haul business travel has historically been very central to our business plan and was the segment that took most of the brunt of the airline industry after 9/11 because of the impact on the airport experience and the uncertainty that built into the whole proposition. So that is where our efforts have been focused. We're working hard to make the travel experience consistent and predictable. Much of that is not only volatile, but also outside our influence, particularly as it relates to security. Yet we work hard to project our influence into those circles as best we can. Most recently in Seattle-Portland we've instituted a guarantee to our shuttle passengers that they will never have to wait more than five minutes to get to security screening or we will pay them 1,000 bonus miles. We've engineered (Horizons' express line) so we can guarantee that they will not have to wait more than five minutes to be presented to security.
So that's an example of what we are doing to restore the value proposition. We're also paying a lot of attention to the way that we differentiate the product, fine...