2011职称英语综合(A级)阅读理解、答案

nal Airlines(A级)



International airlines have rediscovered the business traveler, the man or woman who regularly jets from country to country as part of the job. This does not necessarily mean that airlines ever abandoned their business travelers. Instead, companies like Lufthansa and Swissair1 would right argue that they have always catered best for the executive class passengers. But many airlines could be accused of concentrating too heavily in the recent past on attracting passengers by volume, often at the expense of the regular traveler. Too often, they have seemed geared for uantity rather than uality.

Operating a major airline is essentially a matter of finding the right mix of passengers. The airlines need to fill up the back end of their wide-bodied jets with low fare passengers, without forgetting that the front end should be filled with people who pay substantially more for their tickets.

It is no coincidence that the two major airline bankruptcies were among the companies specializing in cheap flights. But low fares reuire consistently full aircraft to make flights economically viable, and in the recent recession the volume of traffic has not grown. Eually the large number of airlines jostling for the available passengers has created a huge excess of capacity. The net result of excess capacity and cut-throat competition driving down fares had been to push some airlines into collapse and leave many others hovering on the brink2

Against this grim background, it is no surprise that airlines are turning increasingly towards the business travelers to improve their rates of return. They have invested much time and effort to establish exactly what the excutive demands for sitting apart from the tourists.

High on the list of priorities is punctuality; an executive?s time is money. In-flight service is another area where the airlines are jostling for