Low cost air travel is now more accessible than ever. As the public become increasingly travel-savvy and ambitious, more and more airlines are making a decided effort to reduce passenger costs in order to make their services more appealing when flying around the United States. One such airline that stands out from the rest in this field is Air Tran Airways which operates in itself as a subsidiary company of the larger Southwest Airlines firm.

The company is operated from headquarters in Orlando in the state of Florida, but provides budget air travel to destinations across the United States and much of Central America. The airline manages over 700 flights per day, with a large bulk of the travel occurring across midwestern and eastern states in North America. 180 of Air Tran’s departures operate from the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport; incidentally, the largest airport in the world in terms of passenger traffic.
Due to the relatively low frequency of flights that Air Tran operates, the airline is able to afford more in terms of passenger facilities. For example, the company’s fleet entirely consists of state of the art Boeing 717 jet planes.

As with many budget airlines, the company’s business model is structured around the concept of minimising expenditure in order to pass these savings onto customers, hence hoping to attract more custom by attractively low air fare costs. The airline has therefore always been something of a forerunner in regards to reducing flight costs. Indeed, in 1993, the airline was the first in the world to launch a non-ticketed flight service that was available en-masse, therefore reducing ticket sales costs and creating a less complicated flight procedure for passengers.

It isn’t just in the field of cost reduction that the company has been at the forefront however, in 2009 the company was the first to adopt the use of the Gogo Inflight Internet system which allows passengers to connect to the internet via devices that are equipped with Wi-Fi capabilities such as tablet computers, smartphones and laptops.

As of September 2010, the company was bought up by the Southwest Airlines company and a merger period followed shortly after. This venture has allowed the conglomerate to offer flights to destinations further afield such as Montego Bay, Cancun and Aruba. All of the aircraft in the fleet have now been decorated in Southwest livery to create a uniform and standardised image. The new merger can only mean good things; both for the company and the passengers!