Kenya Airways Hires American Turnaround Consultant

Kenya Airways has hired an American consultancy to advise on the restructuring of its operations, as the management struggles to turn around the fortunes of the troubled airline. New York-based Seabury has been picked to evaluate KQ’s sales, ticketing and network planning functions and benchmark them with best practices in the airline industry. The firm’s consultants have been working at KQ for the past six months hand in hand with a global financial adviser that the carrier hired around the same time to restructure the airline’s debt and retire short-term loans. The national airline, which posted a net loss of Sh10.5 billion in the half-year ended September, has secured a Sh4.2 billion soft loan from the Treasury and another injection of an undisclosed amount from KLM, which together with the government are the joint anchor shareholders of the company. “The Seabury team will looking at all our commercial business and benchmarking with the industry,”said KQ managing director Mbuvi Ngunze at a media briefing on Wednesday. “They will then give recommendations based on that audit. They will highlight the areas where there is scope for improvement.” Mr Ngunze said the consultants are interrogating KQ’s sales as well as revenue management, the variables that the carrier uses to assign seat prices. The consultants brief also include network planning – a process that will see them answer when, how and why KQ plies its destinations and how efficiently this is done. Seabury is a 20-year-old company that offers advisory services in sectors like aviation, aerospace, defence, financial services, maritime and logistics, among several others. The company guides airlines on aircraft acquisition and sale, technical support as well as network planning. Its clients include Virgin America, Cathay Pacific and United Airlines.