There will be TV ads soon, a first for the carrier, and rare move among low-cost carriers per se. But David says: “we’ve now got something to sell, which is high personal service, and frequent, and reliable, low-fare flights.”
He says there was no point promoting a damaged brand before the fundamentals of the operation were fixed. And Tiger will soon be as easy to book and manage for consumers as any airline, when it rolls out of mobile app and reinstates a simple, no nonsense web check in process.
“Cheap, frequent, reliable, accessible…” he says with emphasis.
A year ago Tiger was certainly cheap except for a last-minute booking, when it was incredibly expensive. It wasn’t reliable, and it was, time and time again, tricky and difficult to use.
In the current fare war, the difference between the fare levels Tiger needs to charge to break even, and the fare levels Big and Little have on widespread offer, can be as little as $15-30 one-way on a short eastern cities flight such as Sydney-Melbourne. Back before grounding, that gap was $65-125, creating a much more tangible reason for flying Tiger than there is today.
That is one reason David this week dropped 10,000 seats to $10 one-way between Melbourne and Sydney onto the market. “We won’t make any money on them,” he says. “But we will introduce a lot of new customers to what Tiger is all about, which is a cheap, reliable, frequently-available seat, and a high personal service ethic.”
In a long interview, David says the low-fare revolution is unstoppable, and it changes forever what people will expect from air travel, and how they will use air travel to change their lives for the better.
He draws attention to ‘family’, too. At Virgin Blue, the staff were united under a ‘keep the air fare’ banner that was instigated by its founding CEO Brett Godfrey.
David has his ‘family’ all working in synch toward making Tiger as successful in Australia as Ryanair and easyJet have been in Europe, or the somewhat more internally harmonious Southwest has been in the US.
No one could seriously suggest Jetstar is one big happy family. The notion of management/staff engagement seems totally out of place in the labour-in-its-place or upstairs/downstairs divide that pervades Qantas/Jetstar.
David’s comments about ‘family’ are, on reflection, exceptionally relevant to what could happen in Australian domestic aviation. Southwest and its European imitators have done everything the analyst community derided as impossible in recent history. They have survived, prospered, expanded, and enriched their employees with jobs and retirement benefits that endured, and were not stolen from them as was the case when some legacy carriers deliberately flew into Chapter 11 in order to keep sweeping the money into seriously overpaid and underperforming managements, and gutting their shareholders in the process.
Although hated by some unions and flying professionals, those carriers, which Tiger seeks to emulate, not only created stable jobs for aviation professionals, but facilitated the greatest mobilisation of air travellers in the history of transport, transforming Australia – whether we are ready for this, or not.
