Over the past couple of months, I’ve spent a lot of time in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, and that resulted in an overdose of branding messages from regional airlines like Singapore Airlines, Malaysia Airlines, AirAsia and Tiger Airways. I was intrigued in particular by Malaysia Airlines’ “Malaysian Hospitality” campaign – which is a play on the MH code of the airline. Soon...
SXSW Interactive Festival Begins 12 Mar’10 || FOX 7 Southwest Festival began on Friday with tech savvy professionals, including Shashank Nigam and Michelle Banter, at numerous panels and discussions. One of the co-founders of Twitter, Dom Degola, was one of the featured speakers… read more Asia, Mid East to help aviation industry soar 11 Mar’10 || Today … “Air Asia...
Chile has been in the news for the past couple of weeks, due to the earthquake. And then due to the resilient efforts of the Chileans in bringing the country back to its feet quickly. And the aviation community, lead by IATA is also doing its part by going ahead with FIDAE – the Chilean Airshow – and the Wings of Change conference, despite the damage incurred during the earthquake. One...
Over on Twitter, I was alerted to a letter published in Business Traveller Magazine where a customer had sent in a legitimate complaint letter to United Airlines, sharing his experience of poor service in Business Class and suggested that more investments be made into customer service training. It was great that United Airlines actually responded to the letter in the magazine itself. And that’s...
Last week, I spent three days in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, hanging out with Loyalty marketing professionals from around the world at the Loyalty 2010 conference. I met a number of very talented and interesting people, from airlines, hotels and even retails chain that are trying to drive loyalty. Also part of the event was the Loyalty 2010 Awards for the Most Innovative Loyalty program. The judges had...
This guest article is written by Oussama Salah, who is an aviation expert based in Abu Dhabi, UAE. Being a Jordanian who flies around the region a lot and works in the sector, he shares his thoughts how the proposed sale of two Gulf carriers may or may note be a good idea. ——- In the last week two governments in the Middle East have declared their desire to sell their national carriers...
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...
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...
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”...
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)...