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Aviation History
1984
1984 - 0059.PDF
SIA is by no means unique in selling its services primarily on standards of cabin service, but it has exceptional success in the use of this policy. Below The airline will be replacing all its Airbus A300s with A310s and Boeing 757s over the next couple of years, trading the A300s to Boeing or Airbus The above is not exactly the kind of "deregulation" which SIA wants, but the airline has concentrated recently on slat ing the UK and the USA for restricting SIA's access to extra trans-Pacific frequencies via Hong Kong to San Fran cisco, and via Tokyo to Los Angeles respectively. Both nations, argues SIA, are being protectionist, with the USA working against the spirit of its current bilateral agreement and its stated commitment to deregulation. Pan American is protesting vigorously that SIA should not be allowed to add more capacity on routes which, it says, have too much already. SIA says that it provides only 2 per cent of trans-Pacific capacity, and that if all its plans were executed it would then offer 3 per cent. In the meantime SIA has to continue making a success of its established campaign to attract foreign pas sengers—origin and destination (O & D) obviously, but fifth and sixth freedom as well. The "Singapore girl" seems to do her job well. Batey Ads is the agency which does SIA's work, and has done for the past ten years. In fact SIA values Batey's effec tiveness so much that it has an agreement with the agency's Singapore office which limits the amount of work it may do for anyone else. Although "Singapore girl" is the airline's projected image, the cabin crew split on any service is 50/50 male/female. "Singapore person" does not have the same ring to it. But no campaign will be effective in the long term, like this one is, if customers do not find that there is something in the claim. SIA trains its cabin crew with particular care and puts plenty of them on its aeroplanes. On its 747s (including the "Big Top" 747-300s) SIA puts 18 cabin crew; on the A300s it puts 12; DC-lOs have 14; and 727s field seven. The intention is to maintain a ratio of about 1:25 cabin crew:passengers. If you compare it with other Asian airlines there is nothing special about the crew numbers which SLA fields, though it beats Western carriers by a considerable margin. The average Western airline puts 12-14 cabin crew in its 747s and cannot afford to do better because of the much higher pay which the Westerner demands. SIA enjoys this wages advantage over Western operators, but not over its Asian neighbours because the island State is relatively highly-developed, and the earn ings which the Singapore Girl takes home are higher than the average she would expect in a ground job. Hence Pillay's constant insistence on productivity from all the airline's employees, because this wages disadvantage, relative to other ASEAN nations' carriers, is true of all categories of employee at SIA. Cabin crew director Chris Lee says that the airline receives about 200 letters a month from passengers, about ten of them complaints and the remainder compli ments and suggestions. "We use the suggestions to revise our training curricu lum," Lee says. For example, since a number of complaints had come in about unclear cabin-address announcements he now has a full-time speech instructor. You can judge the extent to which SIA takes its cabin service image seriously by the fact that it now employs the US-based International Travel Research Institute to monitor permanently customer reaction to the product. Passengers in different rows each flight are invited to fill in forms which give the ITRI information about what is satisfactory, unsatisfactory, or missing altogether from what the custom ers expect. The Institute analyses the results and reports regularly to SIA. FLIGHT International, 14 January 1984 79
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