HA will weather storm
AMIDST the slump in consumer demand for air travel, Hawaiian Airlines (HA) Senior Vice President of Marketing Avi Mannis believes the airline is in a strong fiscal and brand position to weather the storm and is primed for a rebound when confidence returns to the market.
Speaking at the Mumbrella Travel Marketing Summit in Sydney yesterday, Mannis said the lessons the airline had learned through crises over the past decade, including health pandemics such as SARS and MERS, had the airline in a strong position to respond.
“The marketplace rewards rapid, tactical pivots and it’s really important when facing a crisis like right now that businesses decisively take action on things, such as in our case like what routes to be flying, what capacity we ought to be flying, who our best customers are and how do we manage our cash burn.
“Those are the things that require rapid action and rapid change,” he said.
Mannis said the airline moved fast to suspend operations from Korea and that some adjustments had been made to the airline’s Japan route too but that other markets were not seeing the same level of fallout.
“We haven’t seen the rate of cancellations in our other markets yet, we have seen a slowdown in demand and so we’re continuing to look at what network adjustments to make and this is why we’ve built a strong balance sheet.
“Everyone’s learned from the experience of 9/11.
“If there’s a shake out of capacity we think we will not be the first to go in any of our markets and if we focus on the long term it gives us potentially the opportunity to solidify our position in these markets,” Mannis said.
The airline is primed for the inevitable recovery, with Mannis saying that “in many of our affected markets we’ve pulled down some of our spend with the intent to build a war chest so that when things do turn up, we can be out there selling really hard and promoting our brand.
“Our marketing teams are planning ahead for the rebound so they don’t have to improvise when that moment comes, and looking at leading indicators of consumer sentiment that will tell us when we see the first green shoots of a market recovery,” he told the audience.