You get what you pay for to fly Eric Loo I fly economy with MAS in my frequent trips home. Of late its scheduling and services have dipped significantly. What used to be eight-hour flights to Kuala Lumpur from Sydney are now averaging 10 to 14 hours. There are fewer direct flights than just a year ago, unless one’s willing to pay more to avoid a two-hour layover in Adelaide either way. On long haul flights of more than 10 hours, servings of food and refreshments are limited. Wine is served, but sparingly. Scotch is served - if you asked. But you’d have to wait until the cabin crew had completed serving the peanuts and juice. By then they would have forgotten your request. So, you settle for a cola drink hurriedly poured into your plastic cup from what was left in a can on the service trolley. While Singapore Airlines, Qantas, Asiana, Etihad and Emirates serve a few meals and refreshments in economy class, you’d hunger and thirst on MAS. These days I pack a few nut bars, packets of dried fruits and a bottle of water in my carry-on to last an eight-hour flight. Friends who flew MAS from Sydney to Europe gave our national carrier a bad rap. While the cabin crew were “generally courteous” the inflight entertainment “sucks”, frequency and quality of food were sub-standard. Noodles and rice were lukewarm; beef, chicken and lamb were dry, vegetables mushy and bland. Indeed. I was thus surprised to read, “passenger numbers (on MAS) are up 30 percent this year on record passenger loads”. My hunch tells me MAS may have benefitted from Air Asia’s crashing reputation for its unreliable scheduling and delayed flights to its disregard, nay disrespect for customers, unreasonable refund policies and deceptive advertisement of discount fares. I had flown with AirAsia - domestic and international sectors - when it was impressively competitive. But no longer. AirAsia’s hubris from its early success when it monopolised the region’s budget airline market in the early 2000s has brought the airline into disrepute, which is a pity as the airline arguably was a prominent Malaysian global brand given the lacklustre reviews of Proton in the budget car market overseas, for instance by BBC’s Top Gear and Australia’s Cars Guide. I was surprised in my research that AirAsia was ranked by Skytrax as a three-star airline and MAS five-star - on par with Singapore Airlines, Qatar, ANA Nippon, Cathay Pacific and Asiana. Skytrax audits the “product and service delivery quality’ of the world’s commercial airlines”. Which means MAS and its frontline staff at the airport and cabin crew are actually able “to deliver a truly consistent and high quality product and service”. But MAS has fallen in its world rankings to 14th position out of 200 airlines in 2013 (from 10th in 2012), according to customer votes in Skytrax’s World Airline Awards. For a while now, passengers have been feeling the brunt of MAS’s cost-cutting drive. Reviews in travel forums are bandying the notion that Malaysian taxpayers would again be bailing out the national airline as in 2001/2 when then-prime minister Mahathir Mohamad authorised the buyback of MAS shares worth RM1.8 billion from its then-chairperson Tajudin Ramli at RM8 per share instead of the market value of RM3.68. From 2010 to 2013, MAS was in the red. It recorded its highest loss of RM375 million in the three months ending on Sept 30 this year compared with a net profit of RM37 million in the same quarter last year. The external causes cited are high fuel costs, intense route competition from budget operators and cashed up airlines such as China Southern, and the global economic downturn. Should MAS appoint a new CEO? As mooted in travel forums, MAS should appoint a new CEO to get the airline back in the black, just as Qantas did in 2008 when it appointed an Irish-born Australian businessman, Alan Joyce, to turn the airline around for the first time five years later in August when Qantas announced a net profit of A$6 million. Aviation analyst the Centre for Aviation (CAPA) in a report ‘2010 Year of the Asian Airline Bailout’ noted that MAS was going through a “cash crisis” following its proposed 1-for-1 rights issue at RM1.60 per share to raise about RM3 billion in cash. The report implied that given MAS’s losses over the years, another government bailout from taxpayers’ money was possible. MAS’s chief financial officer at that time, Mohd Azha Abdul Jalil, rejected the ‘bailout’ speculation in a letter published in the CAPA website. He said the rights issue was “to raise capital on our own merit to fund our future expansion plans”. “Proceeds from the rights issue largely will be used for our fleet renewal programme as we transform our fleet into one of the youngest in this region by 2015/2016. With the new fleet programme, our operating cost and cost structure will be lower, enabling us to offer highly competitive fares, grow our capacity and optimise yields. The fund raising exercise will also aim to enhance shareholders’ value,” he said. Indeed, one of the indicators of public confidence in MAS is its share price, which, however, is hovering around the mid-to-low 30 sen, about a third of its par value. See here for a commentary of why MAS shares are going cheap. As a non-investor though, my real indicators of MAS’s reliance are personal experiences, feedback from friends, quality of inflight services, which as I observed tend to correlate with staff morale, which is at an all time low. MAS cabin crew have threatened to stage a mass walkout in December after the president of the National Union of Flight Attendants Malaysia was suspended for leading a protest to demand the resignation of CEO Ahmad Jauhari Yahya for failing to resolve the plights of the over-worked, underpaid and stressed out cabin crew since his appointment in September 2011.
Posted on: Tue, 03 Dec 2013 14:51:45 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015