Founder of Malaysian low cost carrier Ais Asia Tony Fernandez says he is looking to take the positive out of the current geopolitical crisis by investing in growth.<\/p>\n
In March the carrier placed a $19 billion \u2018landmark\u2019 order of 150 A220s, the largest of its kind for the single isle aircraft.<\/p>\n
Air Asia is in its 25th<\/sup> year and Fernandez told the Trip.com Airline Global Conference in Amsterdam this week the current decade has been the most challenging.<\/p>\n In a typically relaxed interview at the conference, Fernandez recalled how he was inspired to set up Air Asia by the emergence European of low cost carriers like easyJet.<\/p>\n \u201cI was a big fan of Freddie Laker\u2026.I used to hang out at Heathrow Airport, and just was amazed at how people could fly to New York for $59<\/p>\n \u201cAnd so I thought, wow, that was a pinch me moment. This looks great. So, I took a bus to Luton Airport, and I saw people flying to Barcelona for nine pounds, to Paris for six pounds, booking on easyjet.com.<\/p>\n \u201cI always say there\u2019s a very fine line between brilliance and stupidity, right? It\u2019s very narrow, and so I said I could do that.\u201d<\/p>\n At the time only 6% of Malaysians flew, and Fernandez, who has previously in the music industry, acquired a failing airline with two planes and 254 staff.<\/p>\n Despite the challenges in starting an airline against competitors with much larger budgets, Fernandez said this decade, due to the COVID pandemic, has been the hardest.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s easier to start an airline with two planes and 200 staff than to restart an airline with 300 aircraft and 21,000 staff. It has been really hard.<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of airlines got support from their governments. We got nothing\u2026we had to do it all ourselves, and we lost $10 billion of revenue during COVID.<\/p>\n Fernandez described himself as \u201ca little bit contrarian\u201d. \u201cCrises are a great time to build market share when everyone\u2019s kind of like thinking what are we going to do?\u201d<\/p>\n He said he was able to negotiate an \u201camazing price\u201d for the order of 150 A220s and said the war on Iran will inevitably end, just as COVID did.<\/p>\n \u201cTime and time again the world has proven that travel is very sticky and\u2026American Express and Visa said that in a recession people would cut other things before travel.\u201d<\/p>\n Fernandez said in Southeast Asia travel by train instead of by air is not really an option. \u201cSo I think we\u2019re in a really good part of the world,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n A \u201chuge believer\u201d in AI, Fernandez claimed it will \u201ctransform travel\u201d and he says Air Asia is already benefitting from it operationally.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s going to improve productivity, it\u2019s going to improve enterprise, it\u2019s going to improve customer [service], and massive on operations.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve been playing around with it for a long time. Depending on the age of your aircraft, it burns fuel differently.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you fly to Singapore, you\u2019re going to burn a lot more fuel than if you\u2019re cruising 36,000 feet for three hours.<\/p>\n \u201cBy getting the right aircraft at the right window, it just can\u2019t be done humanly. And so we use AI for that, and we\u2019ve saved 4% fuel.<\/p>\n \u201cOperations can be massive. There\u2019s a whole customer experience thing, and I think you can remove a lot of friction for the customer.<\/p>\n \u201cImplementing it is key. I find AI for the customers a little bit rigid, it\u2019s not there yet, but eventually it will be, and I think it will transform travel.\u201d<\/p>\n Fernandez said it is time for low cost airlines to collaborate and work together more. \u201cTraditionally low cost airlines don\u2019t work with other airlines. I think that\u2019s wrong.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a few airlines we\u2019ve been partnering with to make the world a smaller place.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of value in partnership, and we believe that tremendously, we\u2019re beginning to fly to Europe, and tied up with many low-cost carriers.\u201d<\/p>\n Fernandez recalled how Air Asia was able to survive the COVID crisis by diversifying and building out its brand and company ethos beyond aviation.<\/p>\n \u201cDuring Covid, we had no support, we had to really reinvent ourselves, and so we took various assets in the airline to create new companies, which is saving the airline money.<\/p>\n \u201cWe created an engineering company [Asia Digital Engineering], which is doing unbelievable things.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re so far ahead. We\u2019re the fastest in the world at doing a C check. Air France is sending us planes.<\/p>\n \u201cWe never had a cargo company, but when we couldn\u2019t fly, I took all the seats out. I thought this is a pretty good business.<\/p>\n \u201cSp we built a cargo airline called Teleport which just become number one in ASEAN, and then we took our website\u2026and we created our own kind of small little OTA.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOur food is very popular, so we created restaurants and now we\u2019re doing grab and go.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve opening over 500 of them and I thought why don\u2019t we brand our food. Ninety million people fly us, and I don\u2019t have to pay any advertising.<\/p>\n \u201cNinety million people will know my food brand. And then we created a branding company.<\/p>\n \u201cAirAsia, to me, is not an airline anymore, it\u2019s a philosophy, it\u2019s how we\u2019ve treated people.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have 21,000 staff, we don\u2019t have any unions, we\u2019ve got a very flat structure. We have not a single day of industrial action. We were the first airline to have female pilots.<\/p>\n \u201cYou join our company\u2026and you can dream. We have many people who carry bags for us, or telephone operators, who are now CEOs or captains.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve created this amazing culture. So, we created this company called Air Asia Next, which is how we take our way into other industries without us financing it.<\/p>\n \u201cA very large hotel company, which we\u2019ll be announcing next month, is licensing our name to create AirAsia Hotel.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd even a multinational hospital group want to bring AirAsia culture into the hospital, so there\u2019s going to be an AirAsia hospital opening up in Malaysia in the next six months.\u201d<\/p>\n Fernandez ended on a note of optimism: \u201cThose are the five companies we created during COVID just to survive. My cabin crew were delivering food, my pilots were taxi drivers during this period.<\/p>\n \u201cTo everyone here, it\u2019s a crisis, but through a crisis there\u2019s always an opportunity, there\u2019s always a silver lining.\u201d<\/p>\n The post Trip.com AGC 2026: \u2018Crises are great time to build market share\u2019 says Air Asia\u2019s Tony Fernandez<\/a> appeared first on Aviation Business News<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Founder of Malaysian low cost carrier Ais Asia Tony Fernandez says he is looking to take the positive out of the current geopolitical crisis by investing in growth. In March the carrier placed a $19 billion \u2018landmark\u2019 order of 150 A220s, the largest of its kind for the single isle aircraft. Air Asia is in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zephyrsys.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zephyrsys.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zephyrsys.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zephyrsys.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zephyrsys.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zephyrsys.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2206\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zephyrsys.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zephyrsys.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zephyrsys.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}