Gulf Air on Wednesday unveiled a major commercial initiative aimed at enhancing its market share by tapping Saudi and Bahraini corporate clients.
This was announced by the airline’s Chief Commercial Officer Karim Makhlouf at a Press conference who said that the airline would tap 2000 potential corporate clients both in Saudi and Bahraini markets.
“Gulf Air is all set to expand its customer base and increase its revenue by introducing a range of new products, services and incentive packages for key customer segments while strengthening its home market share,” Makhlouf said.
“Since the launch of the airlines new business strategy in November 2009 by Chief Executive Officer Samer Majali, we have made some notable progress; we added 15 new destinations to our network, discontinued four unviable routes, brought in 14 new aircraft, improved our on-time performance by 7% and achieved a fleet technical dispatch reliability of 98.9%.”
“Now the time has come for us to focus on our customers’ needs and increase our commercial efficiency through aggressive sales and marketing in order to make Gulf Air a sustainable and ultimately, a profitable airline. Therefore, we conducted an extensive survey to understand our customers’ needs and more importantly, how to win back their business.”
“We realised that our market share at home – the Kingdom of Bahrain- is just 32% – the lowest compared to our regional competitors. At the same time, competition has increased with more and more new airlines including low cost carriers entering the market eating into our customer base and thus, our market share.
“As the national carrier of the Kingdom, it is imperative that we own our home market. Therefore, we have launched a series of customer-focused initiatives to regain our market share. These new initiatives have been designed to target every customer segment – family, business, government, pensioners and the youth.”
For the corporate business segment, Gulf Air will be introducing Falcon Corporate Plus – one of the region’s most competitive innovative incentive programmes yet – designed exclusively for corporate travellers. The Falcon Corporate Plus programme offers a basket of different exclusive privileges that can be tailor-made for each client. The range of benefits include exclusive price discounts, free upgrades from economy to Falcon Gold class, free lounge access for economy class passengers, and both free parking and chauffeur service to and from the Bahrain International Airport.
“Gulf Air has also been proactively promoting in-bound tourism to Bahrain. Earlier this month, it announced a joint promotion with leading five star hotels in the Kingdom. The campaign, coinciding with the Bahrain Summer Festival being held in July, offers residents of GCC countries a chance to splurge in five star luxuries in Bahrain’s leading hotels at an unbeatable price when they travel with Gulf Air.
“Customers have become more discerning these days and their travel preferences and needs keep changing. Gulf Air realises that it needs to gauge customer preferences, gain a clear understanding of their needs and wants, and proactively set trends to stay ahead of competition. Our products, services and packages should meet their expectations, delight them and surprise them so that we not only retain customer loyalty, but also further attract more customers. These initiatives are just the beginning in this direction.”
“Our ultimate aim is to make Gulf Air the carrier of choice in the region with a strong emphasis on being a family and business-friendly airline while establishing a leadership position in our home market,” he added.