Jetstar’s regional hurdles
where I got to photograph him pregig for a student newspaper.
Brazier felt at home in the regions and played to packed audiences when he took Sailor on the road.
The provinces responded in kind, giving the boys warm receptions.
The provinces are also giving Jetstar a warm reception at the moment with the recent news they are expanding their services from the main hubs to target heartland New Zealand.
The low-cost carrier has won private and public support with the news it’s bringing five more aircraft into New Zealand and will provide new connections to Napier, New Plymouth, Nelson and Palmerston North.
With initial promotional fares of just a few bucks and improved ability to operate national businesses from regional towns, the announcement has gone down well.
Given these four new destinations will interconnect with the current five metropolitan hubs the total effect of new possible travel routes isn’t trivial. Not only will consumers and regional businesses get a better deal and better servicing, regional tourism will benefit; particularly when most of the new locations fit in well with the current popularity for ‘‘short break’’-style getaways.
And if the effusive support from provincial mayors and regional tourism organisations is anything to go by, you can guess the new destinations will be tipping in some resource to make sure the new access is utilised.
It’s also been refreshing to see the self-effacing humour in the television commercial that Australian-owned Jetstar is using. The amusing clip features an Australian announcer who clearly isn’t the sharpest pencil in the case displaying wellscripted ignorance of New Zealand geography.
Joking aside, Jetstar faces two challenges to make a fist of this latest opportunity – one from without and one from within.
The external challenge will simply be getting sufficient bums on seats.
While promotional pricing and aggressive advertising will help ensure the initial seats are full, if the public don’t continue to respond over the medium term then the maths simply won’t work.
No-one has confirmed how long the new provincial contracts are for, but you can bet Jetstar has elbow room to pull the pin if the necessary numbers aren’t reached.
However, the bigger challenge is from within. Not so long ago the Jetstar brand was synonymous with terrible customer service and worse public relations – even their public relations advisers fired them.
Everyone seemed to have a story of cancelled flights, dreadful customer service and diabolical communications.
And the (then) chief executive didn’t help by robotically repeating a single sentence to the media.
Rather than just annoying time-poor business people, Jetstar seemed to have an uncanny ability to target the disabled.
The cut-price airline repeatedly refused to board wheelchair-bound customers. In one infamous case rather than talk to the customers, the Jetstar staff rang the customers’ boss, effectively treating them as mentally disabled rather than physically disabled.
It subsequently emerged that Paralympics New Zealand had major issues with the company on a separate issue, when six of an eightmember team were turned away.
A Google search quickly brings thousands of customer service catastrophes to the surface. It also surfaces www.dontflyjetstar.com, a protest website which diarises individual fail stories and charts the worst destinations and worst ports of origin.
So this latest expansion of service by Jetstar isn’t just a chance to grow its local business, it’s also a great opportunity to rebuild the brand.
Thirty years ago after taking his photograph, I asked Brazier how he felt when he went out on stage each night. ‘‘I just try not to bugger it up,’’ he told me. Pretty good advice for Jetstar right now I reckon.
Graham Brazier