Annual Report 2019

AIRASIA.COM AirAsia.com started out in 2001 as a website where guests could book AirAsia flights to destinations within the region. Today, realising the vision of AirAsia’s founders, the portal has become an online ecosystem that satisfies the travel and lifestyle needs of over a million visitors per day. The goal? To leverage the full potential of AirAsia’s resources — including content generation, our e-commerce marketplace, and food, fintech, hotels, loyalty programme, mobile as well as insurance services — to become the fastest-growing travel and lifestyle tech platform in ASEAN. Four critical pillars underpin the success of AirAsia.com: platform robustness, data, product expansion and people. Much work has been put into strengthening AirAsia’s technology platform, the most significant in 2019 being the creation of the AirAsia Software Engineering & Technology (AASET) team in Bangalore to support our KL tech engineering hub. These teams, together with our tech partners, have enabled us to better engage our guests before, during and after they travel with us. With our in-app chatroom platform LIFE, for example, guests can connect with each other and share trip planning ideas. Using the biometric facial recognition tool FACES, which they can download via our AirAsia app, they get to enjoy a more seamless travel experience. Meanwhile, leveraging the rich data we collect daily from the various touch points on our platform, we have best-in-class customer profiling and end-to-end understanding of consumer purchase behaviour — from origin and destination of purchase, to time of purchase, length of stay and preference of travel- related products. This enables us to personalise our guests’ journey, displaying previous purchases, recommendations of similar customers and geo-targeted promotions upon arrival at their destination. Such personalisation significantly improves the efficiency of AirAsia ads with enhanced uptake. As for products, AirAsia.com now offers eight core product lines – Flights, Hotels, SNAP, Activities, Deals, Mobility, AirAsia Ads & WiFi and B2B, with four more in the pipeline — namely Corporate Travel, Ticketing, Muslim Travel Packages and Medical Travel. In November 2019, AirAsia became the first airline to sell competitor flights by partnering a leading European online travel agency (OTA). Through virtual interlining, we are able to offer more than 3,000 destinations with 1.5 million permutations to fly around the world. SNAP, which offers best-price guaranteed flight and hotel accommodation bundles, is a natural extension of our network strength in ASEAN. In these bundles, we will be able to put together unparalleled deals combining the lowest daily fares on both flight and accommodation through our directly sourced hotel inventory encompassing the Ormond Group, Genting, Lexis Hotel Group, ParkRoyal Resort and Minor International, with many more in the future. To become a lifestyle platform, we have four lines of business (Deals, Activities, Ticketing and Mobility) that will further enhance our customers’ experience. Deals makes available attractive offers such as buy-one-get-one-free pizza, discounts on haircuts, spa treatments, manicures and more. Activities offers flexible à la carte purchases of local tours or passes to attractions like Aquaria KLCC or Sunway Lagoon — all at preferable prices. Ticketing is where we will sell tickets to concerts, football matches, etc. One high-potential partnership is that with the new entity under AirAsia Group, RedRecords. With Mobility, we initially offered an hourly shuttle service from KL Sentral in Kuala Lumpur to klia2 at only RM9.90. This proved so popular that we have signed on the bus company to provide the service on a permanent basis. AirAsia Ads & WiFi leverages the huge traffic we have across the Group’s physical and digital assets to consolidate, personalise, sell and deliver to other advertisers. The more than 120 million guests we carry every year will now have access to proprietary content developed by FORMAT, our sister content generation company, as well as view ads via our inflight wifi network. We have also launched a B2B portal for some 15,000 travel agents on our books, enabling them to purchase not just air tickets but hotels, activities, insurance and the expanded range of services using their agency credit account. AIRASIA GROUP BERHAD ANNUAL REPORT 2019 107 BUSINESS REVIEW