The new head of Kelowna’s home-grown airline says his company will have to more effectively engage millennials to succeed in the hyper-competitive discount airline market.
Jim Scott took over as the CEO of Flair Airlines earlier this month and says he hopes to steer the company further into the digital age.
“Our customer now is digital,” Scott told Okanagan Edge Jan. 23, pointing out that 70 per cent of Flair’s customers are millennials. “They want to know where’s our app, and am I going to get a text if my flight is delayed?”
Flair has lagged slightly in those areas, he says, but will need to step up its game in order to fend off the host of competitors angling to corner the country’s cheap flight market.
Based in Kelowna, Flair emerged as Canada’s third national airline last year, after it bought the discount flight seller NewLeaf.
Scott took over in mid-January, after founder and president Jim Rogers sold his shares and stepped down. A former airline pilot, Scott founded and ran Jetlines Canada—a company that also hopes to break into Canada’s discount airline market—before making the move to Flair.
Scott says he founded Jetlines, and subsequently moved to Flair, because he saw a virtually “abandoned” discount flight market in Canada.
Ideally, he said, people in Kelowna would jet down to Vancouver for a weekend show, or Lower Mainlanders would come here for short visits. However, flights have traditionally been too expensive, so that hasn’t really happened.
“A healthy country has about 15 per cent of its flying done in the discount market. Canada needs it, and we’re going to occupy it,” Scott said.
Flair will have to fight off challenges from other discount airlines to make that happen, particularly WestJet, which last year announced it was moving into the market with Swoop.
Scott says Flair is in the process of cutting its internal costs by about 20 per cent, in a move he hopes will keep the company’s prices lower, and beat out the competition.
He also says a keen focus on customer service will set Flair apart.
“At the end of the day, whether you pay a lot for a flight or a little for a flight you need to be treated like friends and family,” he said. “Airlines that are not experienced in really defining that customer experience” will struggle to keep customers.
Scott said demand for customers in Canada’s marketplace is about 10 million a year, and Flaire is aiming to capture 10 per cent of them. Other people coming into the marketplace, he said, could actually have some benefits.
“It’s like going into a mall, where there’s only one store, that store owner says I don’t have to compete against any other people, but nobody comes,” he says.
Scott also said Flair has big expansion plans in 2018. This spring the company will add two new aircraft to its fleet, and plans to add new destinations in the United States and the Caribbean.
All Biz Releases Stories
