Bringing the X factor back to AirAsia
AirAsia X acting chief executive Benyamin Ismail has been meeting Australian travel agents and tourism bodies to find ways to boost tourism through AirAsia Group’s extensive network.
The Kuala Lumpur-based long-haul, low-cost carrier had seen a fall in demand from Australia and wanted to understand why, Mr Ismail said.
He was investigating how AirAsia X could partner with travel agents, Tourism Australia and state bodies to find ways to push inbound traffic while working with Tourism Malaysia on outbound flows.
“I have to say, sadly, Malaysia may be secondary to top destinations such as Bali or Thailand,’’ he said.
“What we want to sell through the whole markets … a fly-through product where we connect you to north Asia, we connect you to the Middle East or we connect within our ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nation) countries.’’
AirAsia X is set to take a more cautious approach after big capacity increases into Australia saw it lose money on the market, hitting overall profitability and forcing it to slash services to local ports as well as axe its Adelaide flights.
The airline flies daily services to Sydney, 11 times weekly to Melbourne, 12 times a week to Perth and five times to the Gold Coast.
It plans to offer double daily seasonal flights flight from Sydney, Melbourne and Perth from November, and Mr Ismail said he hoped that, ultimately, these would become permanent. He was also optimistic about eventually returning to Adelaide.
AirAsia X was profitable on an operational level and he expected to be back in the black in terms of its bottom line next year.
The airline took a hammering over Christmas because of its handling of a delayed attempt by its Indonesia arm to launch services over the festive break between Melbourne and Bali.
AirAsia Indonesia had caused further angst when an A320 plunged into the sea off Indonesia on December 28 with no survivors.
Mr Ismail said the airline had dealt with refunds from the Melbourne-Bali flight as well as given the competition watchdog an undertaking that it would turn around refunds within 14-days.
He said the airline was also looking at on-time performance and possibly low-fares guarantees as it moved to rebuild trust with Australian consumers.
The airline was also looking “at connecting new dots’’ with routes such as Kuala Lumpur-Osaka- Honolulu, which was expected to launch in November.
London was still on the cards for the low-cost carrier, however, Mr Ismail said this would depend on negotiations with Airbus for high-gross-weight A330s.
He said the airline wanted to take two A330s next year to service London “providing the economics work’’.
If the high-gross-weight plane did not work on the route, the airline would look at one-stop flights through destinations such as Italy’s Milan and Istanbul in Turkey.
A big change was in how AirAsia X was establishing closer connections with sister short-haul airline AirAsia.
Mr Ismail said AirAsia X had previously been run separately to AirAsia, with little communication in terms of fly-through products and fairly expensive fares when both were added up.
“So what we’ve done now is that we regionally work one fare,’’ he said. “For example, if you want to go from Sydney to Phuket you fly an AirAsia X flight to KL and then you hop on to a short-haul flight and, entirely, what you want to see as a consumer is one fare that is at least 20 per cent to 30 per cent cheaper than a competitor.’’
Air Asia was also providing discounted fares for travellers taking up AirAsia’s ASEAN pass, similar to a Eurail pass, that gave travellers access to 148 train routes across all 10 countries for fixed rates.
The airline was the first airline to buy the Airbus A330neo and plans to take 80 of the aircraft over a 10-year period from 2017.