Cathay Pacific believes in more flexibility and freedom to customers
Whilst there have been significant setbacks this year due to the outbreak of the pandemic, Cathay Pacific continues to serve customers based on their three core values of being thoughtful, progressive and having a can-do spirit. As a world-leading service brand, they continue to upgrade their offerings, thereby giving customers a more seamless and memorable experience when they travel with them. Anand Yedery, Regional Head Marketing and Sales – South Asia, Middle East and Africa, shares more about the airline’s recent developments.
Given the ever-changing nature of the current scenario, Cathay Pacific India team has been using leading industry tools to understand the travel demand mainly from India to Hong Kong and further to the popular Asian, North American and South West Pacific routes.
“We are constantly monitoring government announcements regarding travel orders for different countries, customer sentiments along with behaviour trends through search and booking engines. Furthermore, ongoing conversations with our trade and corporate partners also help draw insights in understanding the customer’s willingness to resume travel to the destination of their choice,” says Anand.
Over the last few months, they have also introduced Cathay Care, a commitment to their passenger’s safety and wellbeing which includes enhanced measures across every stage of their journey from check-in to the cabin and also in their lounges. These measures begin with contactless check-in, temperature screening at various touchpoints and the installation of HEPA filters across all cabins. Anand shares, “We understand the dilemma our customers could be facing, considering the situation is so dynamic. Hence, we have introduced more flexibility for not just customers who were booked with us in March – April during the global lockdown but also anyone who would like to book going forward.”
To further provide customers with maximum flexibility, Cathay has introduced the ‘Fly Worry Free’ and ‘Cathay Credits’ initiatives, giving travellers the freedom to make unlimited changes to new tickets, without the extra charge and converting their tickets to credits that will enable them to fly at a later date.
The airline continues to be a pioneer in areas of environment and community development. Their initiatives include reducing Cathay Pacific’s single-use plastic footprint to 50 per cent by the end of 2022 and removing nearly 200 million pieces of single-use plastic from the operations annually. “Besides, we strongly support sustainable sourcing of food and being a corporate member of WWF, we ensure the food served is sourced organically. We recently added six Airbus A350s to our fleet making it more fuel-efficient and thereby reducing the greenhouse gas emission. We are committed to successfully delivering a premium service to our customers for years to come,” informs Anand.