Northstar

People An interview with Andrew Stephen General manager, Southeast Asia, TransAsia Airways The history of this carrier dates back to as early as 1951, when it was established as the first private-owned civil airline in Taiwan. Today, TransAsia Airways is an international airline that operates a modern passenger fleet of 18 aircraft, flying to a network of 46 destinations ��� 7 domestic and 16 regional, including China, Japan, Macau, Singapore, South Korea, Vietnam and 23 cross-straits destinations. We catch up with Andrew Stephen, general manager for Southeast Asia, on his plans to grow the Southeast Asian market for The Taiwanese carrier. February 2013 Q. Let���s talk about specifics. You have an ambitious plan to connect all the major cities in the region. What is the concrete plan? We will start flying to Bangkok from sometime around the middle of March, subject to government approval. That will be our third Southeast Asian capital. We are already flying to Hanoi, Singapore and now Bangkok. The plans are to gradually look at other places primarily in Indonesia and Malaysia and build from there on. That���s our plan at the time being but we���ll start with Bangkok and build up from there. 8 other carriers, you may need to transfer to a domestic airport from Narita, to Haneda, so that may take some time. With TransAsia, it saves a lot of time. We are a full service carrier serving the business and economy classes, and we will stay a full service carrier, for the moment. I think what we are good at is being a niche carrier. Q. Tell us more about your key markets. There are primarily four main markets for TransAsia in North Asia there���s Japan, and then there are 23 routes for cross-straits traffic into China. We also have the Southeast Asia and then our domestic market. For Japan, we took the delivery of our first A330 aircraft, our first wide body aircraft, just last December. So with that, it gives us the ability to fly further, to a range of about nine hours of flying time. But for now, we are using our first one to fly from Singapore to Taipei and on connections from Taipei to Hokkaido in Japan. So we offer a full service now from Singapore to Hokkaido that has proven to be quite popular for the Singapore market. Q. In Asia, the LCC market has been well-received with a few major players at the forefront. And there are a few fullserviced carriers doing the hybrid model. Where will TransAsia be positioning yourself? Are we looking at multi-brand approach? We are a full service carrier serving the business and economy classes, and we will stay a full service carrier, for the moment. I think what we are good at is being a niche carrier. I believe there is a market for LCC but our field is not too far away from them. In terms of pricing, we can actually be cheaper. I think being a niche player in Asia is important and it is something that we want to focus on. Q. There are travellers who would prefer direct flights. What do you think are the pull factors for passengers who choose this route? A lot of Singaporeans love to go there for snow and skiing and in the summertime, for the blossoms. The beauty of flying with TransAsia through Taipei is that you go from Singapore to Taipei, Taipei to Hokkaido and you clear the customs and immigration facilities in Japan itself. If you go with some of the Q. You���ve held several senior positions in international airlines and you���ve been based in Asia. How different is it now that you���re working for a Taiwanese carrier? There���s no huge difference, really. I think if you work for an international carrier, you want to have a bit of a mix of people, your passengers are international, and you have to deal with different nationalities. It���s also important to think internationally. Aside from Andrew Stephen cultures, there are more similarities than there are differences. Q. Are there any specific strategies that you use, when targeting to grow the Southeast Asian market? Do you employ techniques such as marketing through social media platforms or working with certain GDSs? All of these are important as every market is different. Any airline that fail to recognise that get into trouble very quickly. The Singapore market for example, takes a lot of booking on the internet. Almost 50 per cent of bookings made in Singapore come from the internet but that is not the case in Taiwan, only about two to three per cent do that online. The rest go through travel agents, the traditional way. So we have to quickly adapt when we came to Singapore to realise that the distribution is very different because the market will not change for us, we have to adapt to the market, certainly. Q. In general, what are your comments or thoughts on the travel industry for 2013? And how do you think it will fare as compared to last year? I think this year will be a tough year, there are a lot of airlines in difficulty, there���s an oversupply of airplanes, then there���s the fuel issue and these will affect the number of airlines in some ways. One of the good things about TransAsia is that fuel is a very low percentage of our total cost. But I think Asia is a very much happier place to be than the US or the Europe in this respect. The recovery time there will be much longer. Events

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