Mishandled baggage: mission accomplished?
25 Feb’10 || MSNBC
… In 2009, there were fewer passengers, fewer flights and, therefore, fewer checked bags to be mishandled. All those new checked-bag fees, according to SimpliFlying’s Shashank Nigam, caused “many passengers to stop checking-in [any] bags unless absolutely necessary … and frequent fliers to travel light,” unless they can take advantage of elevated mileage status and check their bags for free. “That’s the secret behind the numbers,” he said… read more

Marketing special report: Social media
19 Feb’10 || Airline Business

… A return on investment is only one way to gauge the success of a campaign, and “it needs to be complemented with a return on engagement, also known as love or buzz”, says Shashank Nigam, chief executive of global airline marketing and branding consultancy Simpliflying… read more

Poor Results Aside, Qantas Remains an Agile Brand
18 Feb’10 || CNBC
Qantas unveiled on Thursday a first-half net profit that slumped 72% from the previous year, triggering an 8 percent slide in its stock price. In comments to the media, Chief Executive Alan Joyce defended the results, saying the carrier has done better than most of its rivals… read more…

Today, a number of airline accounts were hacked. First, NYC Aviation pointed out that United Airlines was sending out malicious tweets. Later, I received a Direct Message from Brussels Airlines, with exactly the same message, with the URL taking users to a sexual enhancement website.

Staying true to the real-time nature of social media, within minutes, the news of hacking was doing rounds all over the internet. Of course, it’s only to be expected, when United Airlines sends an abnormal Tweet to it’s 56,000 followers. Though United later removed the specific Tweet, the damage was done.

Reversing the brand damage to the airlines, in 3 steps
This is a situation that any airline jumping on the social media bandwagon can face. So, what’s the best way to deal with it? Here are three simple steps.

Be quick. Delete the malicious tweets from your updates (obvious!), but do it quickly. United Airlines took 1 hr 6 mins before their public tweet was …

If you’re already up and running on Twitter, Facebook or other social media tools, a great way to augment your social media efforts is by tapping on one of the hottest trends around, location based services (“LBS”). Location based social networking is something VERY well suited for airlines. Just like “Tweets” was the buzzword of 2009, by the end of 2010, I expect “Mayor” to be the buzzword. And, these services are made to work well in the travel industry.
Popular Location Based Services
If you’re unfamiliar with LBS, here are a few that are popular, including a couple of travel specific ones:

Foursquare – Foursquare is a location based game/application, where users “check-in” at places around the city.  They get points for check-ins, adding new locations, and extra points for multiple check-ins in one day.  Check-ins can be automatically shared on Twitter and Facebook.  They can also become “Mayor” of a location if they have been there the most out of all Foursquare users.  Friends have access to see where you are, and where you’ve been, which can facilitate social gatherings that might have not otherwise happened.

Some companies are starting to use this application to …

Last week, I wrote an article for CNBC, which talked about the agility of Qantas that keeps the airline in profitable territory. The article resulted in a lively debate with a number of Aussie aviation experts down under, and one of them kindly offered to write a detailed Guest Post on SimpliFlying on how it’s actually Jetstar that’s keeping Qantas afloat.

Grant McHerron (aka Falcon124) is an opinionated aviation enthusiast & co-host of Plane Crazy Down Under, Australia’s only aviation podcast. He is an online/digital project manager and perpetual student pilot who can often be found crewing hot air balloons, working airside at Avalon Airshow and plane spotting at airports around the world. He graciousouly hosted me when I visited Melbourne last year, and we almost watched the sunrise in his hot-air balloon Enjoy!

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The latest half-yearly results from QANTAS continue to show an airline that is hemorrhaging cash on its mainline, full service routes. While QANTAS are certainly showing signs of agility, the primary factor keeping the group afloat is the success of their Low Cost Carrier brand Jetstar.
The creation of Jetstar
Towards the end of the 1990′s, QANTAS saw …

Garuda Indonesia on a roll At the Singapore Airshow, I had to opportunity to interview the CEO of Garuda Indonesia – Emirsyah Satar at the CNBC studios and it was quite a revelation (see video below). After churning a healthy $66 million profit in 2008 (after years of losses!), going through a major re-branding effort and ordering brand new Boeing 777s,  Garuda Indonesia is set to start an LCC, CityLink, have an IPO this summer and re-launch flights to Europe at the same time. It’s certainly a brand on a roll, and kudos to Mr Satar for championing the turn-around. Though, work still needs to be done. A brand that needs to re-build trust As we discussed in the interview, the Garuda Indonesia brand suffered setbacks after a few of crashes between 1997-2007, resulting in a ban from the EU for all Indonesian airlines to fly to the continent. …

This article was first published on the CNBC blog———-Qantas announced today a net profit after tax of A$58 million for the first half of the financial year, down from $210 million a year earlier, although the airline did recover from a loss in the second-half of last financial year. This 72% dip in profits resulted in the shares falling by up to 7.2% in early morning trades. However, Alan Joyce, the CEO, says the carrier has done better than most of its rivals. And it has, indeed, thanks to its agility.Agility through smart cost-cuttingAlthough revenues dipped by 13.4%, costs were slashed by 16.2%, which shows Qantas’ diligence and discipline in reducing expenditure in the past year. The cutting of frequencies to unpopular routes and grounding of older aircrafts was key to these cost savings.Load-factors have been the highest in five years – at 82.4%, on flights that carried a lesser number of total passengers as compared to the past year.This simply means that flights were more full than in the past, despite the recession. Of course, the downside was that this was achieved by …

Now that you’ve had a chance to digest the imperatives of a social media policy from my article last week entitled “Five Imperatives For Your Airline’s Social Media Policy“, we decided to write a follow up post with additional considerations for inclusion. Again, these are must-have elements that make your social media policy very user-friendly. Objectives — Talk about the objective of using social media, so employees have a background as to why the company is participating.Disclosures — Educate employees about the FTC guidelines (pdf) about endorsements and testimonials, which is explained well in this article.  Basically, they are required to disclose the company’s connection with the product or service. Use common sense — You can explain that further in your company’s language, but it’s a good one to include. Give and take — Much of social media is about give and take, meaning that you “give” value, and “take” help or value back.  Don’t forget to work both sides of the equation. Personal versus work time — Define what is acceptable to do during work hours.  Updating …

It’s the long weekend in many countries. Canada, US, most of Asia-Pacific are on a holiday. Yet, it’s very nice to see that airlines are listening. Chris Brogan tweeted today that he’d pay JetBlue $7,200 for one year of unlimited flying “pass”. And @JetBlue immediately replied that they’re “listening”.     Somewhere else on Twitterland, Christi Day of Southwest Airlines was dealing with an outburst from @TheKevinSmith, on Valentine’s Day eve, which finally involved Southwest’s VP calling Smith personally. Though these may seem like normal twitter conversations, to me they reflect a paradigm shift in the way airlines have started to deal with their customers. It wasn’t too long ago, where I had to print out and post a letter to an airline for a missed-connection claim, because their email inbox was full! And the matter took over 5mths to get resolved (in the end, I didn’t get my $$). JetBlue and …

RyanAir has a new lounge at Stansted. And it’s for real! RyanAir is known for being creative about ancillary revenues. We all know about the much-discussed toilet charge. But did you know that RyanAir has recently opened a new lounge at Stansted Airport? For under 18 bucks, you get breakfast, wifi, sofas and even showers before you board your flight. And the lounge has received some rave reviews as well.Now this is a sort of service I’m sure many wouldn’t mind paying for – because it’s value-added charges, not charges for un-bundling, as is generally the case.AirAsia has a shop in a mall in KLForget about in-flight shopping – that’s old school and increases the aircraft’s weight. AirAsia now has not one, but two “kiosks” in Kuala Lumpur. One is at the LCCT itself, and a new one has come up at Pavillion Mall. They promise even more outlets soon! Here, you can buy AirAsia merchandise like plane models, t-shirts and even hand-bags.…

I’ve been a guest writer for Mashable.com for a few months now, and my latest article was about how airlines can drive revenue from social media. Those of you who’ve attended my keynote presentation (view slides) on the topic know that I classify this as the holy grail for airlines – something not many have been able to achieve, and there are no “numbers” released from airlines on their social media efforts either.This article seeks inspiration from the likes of Dell, who made $6.4million for selling on Twitter, and applies the lessons to airlines.  Here’s a quick summary of the article and you can read the full version over at Mashable. Clear distressed inventory using real-time mediums like Twitter, e.g. JetBlue Cheeps and United TwaresIntegrate independent social media reviews in the booking path – to boost conversion Integrate with social media travel tools like TripIt – Leverage on the loads of travel information publicly available, like travel plans, to send specific deals to peopleCreate private online communities – exclusive “velvet-rope” clubs of your most …