MAHB next???

Should there be a change when the present management has delivered in terms of passenger numbers, financials and also number of airlines operating at KLIA?

any thoughts?

CEO needs to know - Who is the master, passengers or his bosses?

My bet is the passengers, without which there can be no money. Take care of your customers.

MAS needs a CEO/MD with the guts to set things right

“IF you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.”
That is Nelson Mandela's quote and it aptly describes Tan Sri Tony Fernandes who was once a critic of Malaysia Airlines (MAS). Fernandes and Datuk Kamarudin Meranun bought a 20.5% stake in MAS and both of them have now become directors of the national carrier.
For nearly a decade, he has been lambasting MAS for his airline's - AirAsia - failure to get the right routes among many other issues. Things had not been going well at MAS and it needed to be salvaged.
Tuesday marked an important milestone for both the airlines as the demarcation lines were drawn very clearly.
And for the umpteenth time MAS will undergo a restructuring, turnaround or transformation to get it back on course.
The ultimatum is for MAS to regain its lost glory and that means being only a premium full-service airline.
That is going to be tough when its competitors are already so far ahead.
Execution will be key to making that dream of the airline's shareholders come true.
Fernandes and Kamarudin are the best man for the job, but they will not dabble in the the day-to-day operation of the airline.
So the search for CEO/MD is on.
The person should possess Fernandes' magic touch, Kamarudin's finance acumen and the wisdom of MAS chairman Tan Sri Md Nor Yusof.
Fernandes said he preferred someone who was “numbers-driven like AirAsia X's CEO Azran Osman-Rani, someone with a clear focus, possibly not someone from the airline industry, humble yet analytical, understands the basics of marketing and has a strong head for communications.”
Those who had endured the pain of holding MAS shares for nearly a decade now have their own wish list too. MAS shares, which are at a nine-year low, closed at RM1.80 yesterday.
The person should be ambitious, not just for himself but the airline, someone who sees the big picture, a leader with guts to hire and fire, cut and stop the bleeding, brave enough to end procurement contracts that are at expense of the airline. The candidate should not be distracted just because other airlines dumped fares. He or she has to rebuild the airline, staff morale, shareholder value but the biggest challenge is handling the perception issue. That is why the person needs to be the best communicator and best salesperson. The person has to be mindful of cultural issues and who his or her masters are the passengers or the bosses?
And don't fumble on the front-end passenger seats issue again as the travellers know whether the seats they have bought are really flat for their comfort or otherwise. Get it right once and for all if MAS aspirations are to be a premier airline like Singapore Airlines and Emirates.
The person should eat, breath, think of yields, that's the hallmark to profitability, as without that no number of passengers, connectivity, frequency and comfort can bring in the profits that the airline desperately needs. We are talking about a premium brandnot a mixed bag of premium-to-mid and low-cost.
Throw the dice, take your pick.

An executor who can perform his job with gusto is what MAS needs. If those in power really want the problem at MAS to be resolved once and for all, they should warm up to the idea of even hiring a foreigner, not necessarily a mat salleh. But certainly not someone who is into a quick fix and short-term gains.

Deputy news editor B.K. Sidhu says saving MAS is inevitable but she is drawn to a quote made a long time ago by someone powerful that reads: “I don't care if SIA goes down, but Changi should not, at all cost”.

This article was first published in The Star on August 12, 2011

MAS and AirAsia alliance

The alliance is sealed, expect the colloboration to take place from November onwards so the synergies and benefits will start to show in 2012.

whether you will pay more or less for your next travel will depend on how this whole alliance works.

Will there really be competition?

Malaysia Airlines and AirAsia Bhd will have common directors in Tan Sri Tony Fernandes and Datuk Kamarudin Meranun sitting on MAS board. Datuk Azman Yahya (a director in MAS) and Mohd Rashdan (executive director of MAS) will sit on AirAsia board.

This is a result of a share swap deal where Fernandes and Kamarudin's vehicle Tune Air ends with a 20.5% stake in MAS and Khazanah Nasional Bhd (MAS parent) takes 10% in AirAsia. The deal will change the landscape of the local aviation industry. It virtually takes the element of low cost fares away from MAS.

Food for thought:

Is the deal good for travellers, will fares get lower or will all this curtail competition?

Btw, the pretty Datuk Rohana Rozhan, the CEO of Astro Malaysia is now MAS board member.

And to Tengku Datuk Azmil Zahruddin, you are a good man...all the best to you.

AirAsia and MAS colloboration

The press conference by Khazanah Nasional, AirAsia and Malaysia Airlines at 3.30 pm today in KL

It has been under wraps for a long time and now it is in the open,expect more details on Tuesday.

Those in the know claim it will be very "promising,'' but once again there is an effort to put MAS back on its feet. Why is it always falling after a restructuring, transformation, etc, are all these exercises addressing the real issue the airline faces or just facets of it?

Has some actually cleaned up the procurement side?

How many "bailouts of sorts" do we need to get MAS rising again?

Hope this is the last and hope it does not create a cartel or else we may just have to pay RM820 for a return flight to Singapore.

Get the talent from within to lead.

Also read how critical Ganesh is http://www.sahathevan.blogspot.com/

Are providers bothered about user's grouses?

WHO would have thought there are really some very angry mobile phone users out there?
I was inundated with SMSes and emails from contacts and readers of The Star who read this column last week on dropped calls.

All the emails and SMS from readers have one thing in common - how frustrated they are over dropped calls, failed calls and distortion in voice. This has been going on for nearly two years.

Of the many emails received, one sender, Wang, said “while chatting with my father in Sabah I experienced three dropped calls. Naively, we thought it was his handset problem but actually it is dropped calls.''

For Kumar, dropped calls were a normal thing, but “when I looked at the bills, I would have three or four charges for calls for which I could not get through. Only in this country the consumers are secondary and the providers are the kings. People just don't mind the extra charges (but don't) capitalise on that.''

A senior editor says he faces dropped calls every day and it is really “frustrating.''

Ho said he noticed that his bills had “many calls made in less than five or eight seconds, and are probably due to the call problems ... providers are making substantial gains by charging the customers for the dropped calls.''

Indraveni is frustrated, she wants to change her service provider but has to wait until June. Dan questions if celcos are even providing the necessary network service for users “or (that they) only give priority to those who subscribe for the highest value.''

Soh wants the bad hats in the industry named. His belief is that if you name the party it will force the providers to buck up or they risk users leaving their network.

Tan demands that the regulator do something about dropped/failed calls. In his email he opined that the “MCMC should look at service level agreements. There should be no charge to consumers (for dropped calls) and users should be compensated for services below (par). MCMC, show your authority and take action against unethical providers.''

Ahmad calls for a petition to the MCMC on dropped calls. But who is going to take action against “unethical providers?''

Is it the users, the MCMC, or consumer groups? The issue of dropped calls is an old one. But its recurrence shows that no serious effort has been undertaken to tackle it, so what are the blockages and have the authorities done enough?

The readers will glorify the celcos if the service is good and while they may represent a drop in the ocean of the 30 over million users, they are still users and their voice should be heard.

Dropped calls may be a global issue and in the US recently, the result of a survey on dropped calls was made public because the regulator is vigilant. In South Korea and Singapore, the operators will be fined if the quality of service (QoS) drops to a certain level.

In Britain, the regulator, Ofcom, takes the operators to task and dictates the pricing for services there.

Here, the regulator has in the past done many surveys on customer service but that has been a while.

The last time it commissioned a survey was a handphone survey which was supposed to have ended in December 2010.

An engineer says the regulator does verify the network quality but unfortunately it is not done as frequently as subscribers would want it to be. I think they conduct verifications once every few months.

What can be done to improve the situation of dropped and failed calls?

To reduce or avoid dropped calls, there needs to be total redundancy right from the base station till the core network and that involves more investments; will the celcos invest more at a time when data is growing while voice traffic is coming down. Change the charging to one second block for postpaid and prepaid from 30-60 seconds now.

There should be open scrutiny of an operator's performance in the media for users to decide which operator they want to stick to; this will force improvements in QoS.

The suggestions are there but one thing that we, as users, cannot seem to understand is why are the operators not sensitive to the plight of their users, or are they just concerned about their margins. By right the providers should bend forward and backward to serve their users. More so since they earn the highest margins in Ebitda globally.

So will the situation change any time soon or do users have to take up ad space to tell providers and the regulator of their frustrations?

Deputy news editor B.K. Sidhu believes it's time to switch. She welcomes feedback on QoS, email: bksidhu@thestar.com.my
First published in The Star on April 8, 2011

Do we need to pay for dropped calls?

AT 3am someone was chatting away until her call was rudely disconnected. She re-dialled, talked for a while and again, the scissors was at work. It happened three times within the hour.

She knew it was not the MACC, Bukit Aman or MCMC.

Nobody was eavesdropping, the network just failed on her.

Her frustrations can be understood and the receiver's irritation understandable. After the third disruption, who has the mood to continue talking?

The irony of it all is that the network failed on her in the wee hours of the morning when it was a non-peak hour. Why?

“Perhaps their engineers are too stressed at work, they need to go for a holiday before they drop permanently on the ground,” quipped someone.

Were she not on any plan with her service provider she would have switched operator as she had been facing this dropped call issue for sometime now.

But she is not the only one facing this dilemma. There are so many frustrated users out there and it is not just one network; two big networks are causing all the heartbreaks. It is also not just dropped calls, but failed calls on the first attempt, static or interference, and voice distortions, which make you sound like a gorilla on the cellular phone.

Dropped calls occur when the handover from one cell to another is not clean, so to say. And failed calls are a failure of the call made due to traffic congestion.

For every call there is a specific time block, say 30 seconds or 60 seconds, and every time the call suddenly goes offline in the middle of a call means that you are paying for the full block.

And if you have to re-dail, that is considered another call, like two calls in less than 30 seconds but charged for two 30-second calls.

The consumer loses when his calls are suddenly cut off and the providers gain. It is a known fact that dropped calls are the easiest way to make money for the operators and this gain by the operators have gone unnoticed in many countries as users are unaware of the implications of dropped calls and the authorities are not taking the operators to task.

Malaysia has had cellular phone services for nearly two decades now and this problem continues to exist; in fact, it has been a roller coaster ride for users for basic voice calls.

While we understand that voice traffic is on the downhill and data is slowly becoming “king,” it does not mean that people who talk should face these disruptions so frequently.

This makes us wonder if the service providers are really investing to ensure there is enough capacity for all the new additions they get every month, and are they building and compromising voice.

If operators cannot get this basic service right with 3G and WiMAX, then we ought to revisit the priorities for 4G, LTE.

If this were to occur in South Korea, the providers would be in trouble as the regulator acts on every single complaint from users simply because they take service quality issues very seriously.

Here you wonder if anyone frequently checks on the quality of cellular service any more.

And often you hear operators talking about enhancing customer experience,' I really think they ought to look at this very seriously as if our voice calls go offline suddenly, what customer experience are they talking about? This is bad customer experience.

The question is how long more do we have to contend with dropped calls and still pay for them. Shouldn't the operators be transparent about this and tell us that we have experienced dropped calls and refund us?

Perhaps we should go through the provider's dropped call policy to get reimbursed for lost minutes. The easier alternative is to switch networks or port to those providers that are willing to refund. Waiting for rules on dropped calls to come out may take forever.

Deputy news editor B.K. Sidhu invites feedback on customer's experience on dropped and failed calls and voice distortions. Please email bksidhu@thestar.com.my

First published in The Star on Friday April 1, 2011