Annual Report 2020

Management Discussion& Analysis Further enhancing guests’ sense of security and peace of mind, we introduced Scan2Fly, which enables guests to upload and obtain real time verification of any medical documentation required for their flights, before they arrive at the airport. Further fool-proofing our flight operations, our aircraft are properly sanitised in line with the manufacturer’s and international requirements. These efforts contributed to every one of our airlines, which we call our AOCs (Airline Operating Certificates), receiving the highest safety ranking of seven stars for Covid-19 precautions from aviation safety experts at Airlineratings.com. Seven criteria were used in their evaluation, which took into account recommendations by WHO, ICAO and the International Air Transport Association (IATA). We are proud to share that AirAsia was noted as being among the first airlines to adopt all seven criteria. BUILDING OUR DOMESTIC NETWORKS Our AOCs suffered the brunt of the pandemic in the second quarter, when most of the region was under lockdown and we hibernated our fleet. From the third quarter, however, we started to rebuild domestic capacity focusing on popular routes as travel restrictions within countries relaxed. Driven by strategic capacity and route planning as well as robust demand, by December 2020 AirAsia Thailand exceeded its pre-Covid domestic capacity while AirAsia Indonesia had recovered 93% of its capacity. At the Group level, we ended the year with close to 60% of the number of seats flown prior to the pandemic, and achieved a commendable load factor of 74%, which compared very favourably against our peers. AirAsia Philippines launched two new destinations which proved popular and contributed towards an impressive load factor of 80% for the year. For financial reasons and to focus on Asean where our brand and foothold are the strongest, we made the strategic decision in 2020 to close down our operations in Japan while reducing our equity in India. MANAGING GUESTS’ EXPECTATIONS The pandemic caused a great deal of flight rescheduling, changes and cancellations which, in turn, saw a spike in the number of queries from guests on the different channels of communication we have made available. From an average of about 60,000 calls, messages or online messages a day pre-pandemic, we were having to manage some 250,000 queries daily at the peak of the pandemic. Fortuitously, we had introduced our chatbot, AVA in 2019, before Covid-19 hit. Programmed in 15 languages, AVA was able to resolve about 80% of all guest queries. Supporting the chatbot, we also quickly trained our pilots and cabin crew to respond to guests professionally and accurately. These efforts were not in vain, as indicated by a recent customer satisfaction survey in which we scored above 90% for first contact resolution and guest satisfaction. This is incredibly high for any contact centre under normal circumstances; but to have achieved these results during a period as challenging as we were going through points to the exceptional performance of AVA as well as our Customer Happiness team. Supporting this survey, our Net Promoter Score (NPS) for the year also increased significantly – from 38 in 2019 to 52. What’s more, as a result of clear communication, the vast majority of our guests have been understanding of our cash situation and chose to take credit for cancelled flights over refunds. This has been a substantial boon to support our strict cost containment measures and efforts to manage our cash flow. 64 AIRASIA GROUP BERHAD