Abstract:

Airline industry which is consist of high cost structure, low margin profit, dynamic market, intensive and advanced technolgy, high globalization, and competetive sector thereby failure is not an option in the airline business management. The purpose of this study is to analyze the vision and mission statements of the business in Turkey and the European airline indsutry in terms of the "ideal" vision and mission components, and to find out how much they meet and what points they need to improve in this respect as well as to indicate benchmarking smilar Turkish and European airline companies. This study has been performed by using content analysis method that two authors independently coded the same vision and mission statements. In result of analysis, it was found that inter coder reliablity values 0.84 for vision statements and 0.81 for mission statatements, Turkish airline business’ vision and mission statemens are far away from the ideal point, many components were missing and insufficient, most of the Eupean airline bussiness’ vision and mission statements evaluated as positionning equvalence with Turkish companies;therefore it is determined that theory and practice are incompatible with each other,in the view of strategic management the importance of vision and mission have not been understood, by forseeing weakness of management interms of strategic thinking and strategic movement ability, it is conluded that statements which are available, would not provide required support for competetive advantage

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