How are you positioning the airline given the competition in the region?
So, first of all thank you to Aviation update magazine for giving the opportunity to Alliance Air to showcase what we are.
As you can see the market of the air travel is a tough battlefield. Technologies progress while traveler behavior and priorities constantly shift. Those factors force airlines to be creative and timely with their marketing efforts. Focusing on different aspects of marketing like collaborating with travel agents, focusing on Digital marketing, brand promotions are currently what we focus on. Introduction of timely sale benefits also help passengers where they can take benefits from those sales, especially who book early. Working with distribution channels is one of the most important parts of airline marketing. Metasearch engines occupy a specific place in air travel because they allow you to search flights amongst many and compare prices. All the competing airlines are here, so customer-wise it’s really handy.
What new technologies excite you and how important is it for an airline to invest in a digital transformation?
The increasing demand for personalized travel experiences, coupled with technological advancements, has created a need for airlines to embrace digital transformation meaningfully. By integrating digital technology across all facets of their operations, airlines can enhance IT efficiency, improve customer experience, and ensure passenger safety.
Consistently undergoing periods of digital transformation is crucial for the airline industry to survive and succeed in the long run. In the past, airlines have utilized digital tools to remain competitive and reduce operational costs. With those same digital technologies becoming more pervasive and integrated into operational processes, airlines must take the digital transformation plunge to remain relevant and profitable in the years to come. Advanced technologies like cloud computing, big data analytics, AI, machine learning, and IoT have helped the airline industry undergo a huge digital transformation. These technologies have enabled airlines to collect, analyze, and act on vast amounts of real-time data, fundamentally changing how the industry operates.
How will you improve the company culture?
To improve the company culture, the first step is to observe and understand your organization’s culture is now, and to determine which values will best align with your strategy and structure.. A culture is much more that a set of words. Culture is a collection of shared behaviors, which means changing culture is about changing behaviors. Behaviors are changed by ensuring that they are clearly defined, modeled by leaders, reinforced by organizational levers, spread by a network of influencers and tracked by a set of metrics.
While culture change can germinate in many ways across an organization, the journey can be accelerated from the top management, going down till the lower level. We all can lead from the front from the culture change journey in 4 ways.
- Define the values and behaviors
- Live the behaviors everywhere and every day
- Put weight behind adjusting organizational levers
- Track progress and impact.
What do you think are the main challenges for Alliance Air?
Fortunately, most challenges post Covid are now becoming an opportunity and are being showcased with the Indian aviation Industry operating at Pre- Covid levels. However, high fuel cost contributes to a major portion of the operating cost of any airline. Many State Govts. have gone ahead and reduced VAT on fuel prices and this has boosted the aviation sector in those states.
The financial impact can be especially acute for airlines when it relates to sizeable changes in the value of the US dollar. This is because a large proportion of airline costs (including fuel) are denominated in US dollars, and many carriers need to convert domestic currency into dollars each year to meet their obligations. A more stable pricing will allow us to fly better.
What more do you want to achieve at the airline?
Currently Alliance Air operates to 58 destinations across India mainly connecting Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. Our airline bases are at Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Hyderabad & Dibrugarh. We have plans to further expand our connectivity in the North East of India, with key focus on Arunachal Pradesh connectivity through our Dornier228. In other parts of India we have been adding new flights, whereby our enhanced focus in the near future would be to connect more in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cites in order to become a dominant regional Airline in new BHARAT. Alliance Air has also recommenced its first international route which is operating Chennai to Jaffna in Lanka. In future we plan to expand our network in neighboring nations such as Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh & Myanmar. Our key focus would be to connect regional India to these countries.
