As far as Patee Sarasin, CEO of Nok Air, is concerned, social is the biggest phenomenon influencing the airline industry.
“Mobile is just a technology but social is about emotions, and it’s harder to manage emotions,” said the Bangkok-based executive who set up the low cost airline 12 years ago to transform Thailand’s domestic airline industry.
Patee: “Social is about emotions and it’s harder to manage emotions”
Speaking at the CAPA Australia Aviation Summit in Brisbane last week, he cited the social media storm that ensued in Thailand after the death of a pet husky, Por Jai, on its pet delivery service. A Facebook post by the dog breeder led to such a ruckus on social media that his page was inundated with comments.
In the end, he took a decision to cancel its pet delivery service and made the announcement on his Facebook page. “Nok Air feels sorry for the death of Por Jai and will offer a reasonable compensation. To prevent another incident like this, we will no longer accept pets. Thank you,” Patee wrote on his Facebook page. (See related article in Bangkok Post)
He said that it was even more important today to build brands people like. The former advertising executive has always been a proponent of building “likable” brands, saying in an earlier interview, “If you build the likability [of the brand] and they like you, you’ll have the costs under control, you’ll get the budgets and you’ll drive the revenues”.
Sometimes, “likes” though do not convert into profits and last year has been tough on Nok Air which reported a net loss of US$20 million. Patee said this was mainly due to a shortage of pilots and these issues have now been resolved and the airline was set for a turnaround.
As an early initiator of the Value Alliance, Patee is also a champion of the sales and distribution platform which brings together eight low cost airlines in Asia to enable consumers to buy them on one site, from seats to ancillaries.
While there are those that are skeptical that eight airlines can work together in harmony – the eight being Cebu Pacific, Jeju Air, Nok Air, NokScoot, Scoot, Tigerair Singapore, Tigerair Australia and Vanilla Air – Patee said the platform, powered by Air Black Box technology, is groundbreaking.
“It shows the full potential of what we can achieve for customers by working together,” he said, adding that early results were demonstrating the early promise of the alliance.
“In the end, it’s about the customer and we have to give the customer what they want and need to truly transform travel,” he said.
Mobile is also huge in Thailand and the airline is seeing higher growth in mobile traffic and transactions than on its web browser. “Thais are mad about their devices,” he said.
On the Pokemon Go craze currently sweeping the world, Asia included, Patee said, “I’d put Pokemon Go monsters in my plane, let my customers catch them.”
Nok Air is also expanding into China, clearly keen to tap into the potential of the North Asia segment where competition is getting intense. His approach is not to think of China as one market but different parts. “There are some cities that are larger than the whole of Thailand and we have to segment the market piece by piece,” he said.
In April, he told CAPA, the Centre For Aviation, that scheduled operations to China would begin in June 2016. Initially Nok plans to serve Kunming, Nanning and Quanzhou from Bangkok, and Chengdu from Phuket.
“Thailand gets nearly 8 million visitors from China, it’s a massive market,” said Patee.
Thailand recorded a 71% increase in Chinese visitor numbers in 2015, to 7.9 million, making it by far the largest source market for Thailand’s tourism sector. Chinese visitor numbers were up another 45% in Jan-2016 and 21% in Feb-2016, according to Thailand Ministry of Tourism data.
“It’s perfect timing to go to China,” Sarasin said. “The country is opening up but it has restricted certain Thai airlines from going in. For now, the market isn’t saturated.”
