Delta CEO: Customer convenience is key
CNN's Richard Quest speaks to Delta CEO Richard Anderson about the importance of keeping the customer happy.

Atlanta is fortress Delta when it comes to aviation, isn't it? You are a vast presence here. So I ask you how important is Atlanta to you?
Oh,Atlanta is incredibly important. It is the largest hub in the world; we have takeoff and landing every 45 seconds. And if you look at the DOT statistics, it is one of the most reliable hubs in the world.
So when you look at a place like Atlanta, how did Delta and how did the Atlanta airport grow so big?
A great long term partnership between mayor Hartsfield and Mr. Volkmann the founder of delta that started in 1940 and has been carried on until today with the mayor, the leadership of the city of Atlanta, the leadership of Delta decade after decade after decade.
And yet at the same time, you have great temptations and you have other hubs that you build out at the west coast, the north east, so as the chief executive how do you prioritize when you still got this big hub here Atlanta?
Well, the world is a big place, and we now have 6 hubs in the US and we have 3 hubs outside the US. And the key privatization is where do our customers originate and where do our customer want to go and build the most convenient network to service the customer.
But Delta sends many more people to a central hub like Atlanta than the other airlines, don't you? You perfected maximize the use of the Atlanta hub.
We do, I mean pretty much everything in the United States, large population center within 750 miles in Atlanta and any other real airports in the sanity of Atlanta, so we collect the enormous traffic here.
What do you do next with Atlanta because clearly you are not going to be attacked by any other major airlines on your home base here?
Well, we are going through a massive transformation right now at Delta and we are turning Delta back into a mainline airline. What that means we are up-gagging the flee and we are growing the mainline airline which is airplane flown and operated by Delta employees and dramatically reducing the connection operation rather than what has happened in this industry of the last 25 years which is we put too many people on 50 seats jets for thousand miles, we are stopping that at Delta.
Why?
Because one the economic in the airplane. Number two I don't believe that customers expect to take a 50 seats jet more than about 250 to 500 miles at the most and number three what allowed us to do in Atlanta is to take a market we would serve with 10-50 seats regional jets 10 flights a day and replaced with 6 a day on a bigger plan.
So what is your priority as the chief executive in 2014?
Well, we want to continue to successfully up gate the airline the airline. Second we are going to continue to improve the incredible performance from a reliability perspective that Delta so this year today completion factors 1997 and on time performances are 87 per cent those numbers are unheard of in terms of reliability. But we are going the raise the bar next year.