| Danial Norjidi |
THE outgoing deputy chairman of Royal Brunei Airlines (RB) has said he considers “the people” of RB as the highlight of his time in Brunei, saying he is pleased with the airline’s progress, and has spoken in support and praise of his successor as CEO.
Dermot Mannion recently announced in a press statement that, after five years of service as Deputy Chairman of RB, he will be departing from Brunei following the completion of his term of office.
In the press statement, the Board of RB expressed gratitude to Mannion for his service and commended in particular the successful completion of the restructuring and rebranding of the airline in recent years.
Speaking to the Sunday Bulletin recently, the outgoing deputy chairman said, “It’s been a great privilege to be here and to have the great honour of serving as deputy chairman and CEO for five and a half years.”
Mannion will be succeeded in the capacity of CEO by Karam Chand, who was previously Chief Commercial and Planning Officer of RB.
Dermot Mannion and Karam Chand speaking to the media. – AZROL AZMI
“I’m delighted to introduce Karam as my successor as CEO. Karam has been with us already for three years,” said Mannion. “He’s very well prepared for the new role, and the company will move on to greater and greater things.”
Asked for his thoughts on RB’s direction, Mannion said, “I think all of our stakeholders are pleased with the progress we’ve made.
“Especially in the aircraft area, we now have a brand new fleet of wide-body aircraft and very soon we’ll have a brand new fleet of narrow-body aircraft.
“So I think the product as far as the customer is concerned, which is the most important thing, is getting better and better all the time,” he added. “That is a source of great optimism for everyone in the future.”
The new CEO of RB also spoke to the Weekend Bulletin, saying, “Most airlines went through a very difficult period when the global economy hit around the place, and people scramble and flight business gets impacted straight away when the economic climate is bad.”
“So most airlines, not us, but most airlines around the world faced the same music, and couple with the fuel price at the time was very, very high, so the airline cost was very, very high.”
“Most airlines had to make some kind of transformation and that’s what Royal Brunei did, and did very successfully,” said Chand.
“So we were able to not only change our wide-body fleet completely, brought in a very modern and efficient aircraft, retrained our people and reskilled them, went through a whole brand change and engagement.”
He highlighted how important brand engagement has been and is for RB, underlining that engaging customers, and ensuring they believe and trust their brand has been crucial.
“Even aside from the operational side, we are now spending a lot of time and effort on digital marketing. That’s the way we can make Brunei known widely. That’s the challenge we have, is that the destination awareness needs to be kept improving.
“It would really help to keep improving the destination awareness and the digital channel allows us to do that,” he said. “We are really heavily marketing Brunei and Royal Brunei Airlines to the entire world.”
He also spoke on the progress of new aircraft for RB. He shared that there are a total of seven new Airbus A320neo aircraft coming in, with the first planned for delivery in November 2017. The remaining six are expected to be delivered in 2018 – two in October, two in November and two in December.
“The good news about these aircraft is not only that they’re very, very environmentally friendly and burn less fuel, but from a customer perspective, the cabin interior has been redesigned to take into account customers’ needs,” he said.
“So the seat offering, the cabin layout, quality of air, inflight entertainment system, they’re all pretty much what is available today or next year.”
In addition, Chand said a fifth Boeing 787 Dreamliner will be added to the fleet in 2018. “We’ve taken four (Boeing 787) aircraft and they’ve been successfully flying in our network for over two years.
“There is a fifth aircraft that we take in 2018, and once that aircraft comes in that will settle our long-haul fleet.”
He also spoke on RB’s recent signing of a code share agreement with Turkish Airway, saying, “One thing that airlines are very good at doing is to collaborate with each other, and that’s what we’re doing with Turkey and one of the biggest airlines in the world, so we have a code share with them, and that will allow us to expand our network without having to place our own aircraft.
“So customers will buy an RB ticket, but the aircraft will be partially RB, and the next journey will be Turkish Airlines,” he said.
“That’s a very important part of how airlines collaborate, because it’s not always practical to go to every market, because it requires a huge amount of resources in terms of manpower, aircraft and so forth.
“So for smaller airlines, collaboration is a very, very important part of growing our network,” Chand added.
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