Comment on Lindsey Chung’s post: Wow Air: $99 Flights Across the Atlantic

The post highlighted an interesting story on how a new entrant in the airline industry, Wow Air, is offering unusually low prices for plane tickets across the Atlantic ocean. Although this deal seems almost too good to be true, it is explained in the article that what gave this airline the unique advantage is the geographic location of its headquarter in Iceland, which allows its planes to fuel at the midpoint and thus enabling the company to reduce cost on a large scale.

As Lindsey has pointed out, Wow Air will likely achieve huge success and steal many customers from its average competitors by adopting this cost leadership strategy. What makes me curious is the chain/spin-off effects of the launch of this cheaper option; as an disruptive innovator, this new player has the potential to bring about huge changes within the market, and may even threaten the existing incumbents, including large companies that currently dominates a significant portion of the market share. However, Wow Air should also develop other strategies, and especially to focus on marketing efforts so they can quickly expand so they can have more opportunity to equally compete with the bigger airlines.

Work Cited

Fredman, Roberto A. “Wow Air Launches $99 Fares across Atlantic.”Gloucester Daily Times. The Washington Post, 30 Oct. 2014. Web. 01 Nov. 2014.