22 June 2000 In October 1998 Royal Brunei Airlines (RBA) quietly cancelled services to Beijing and Osaka, Japan.
In the last two years, the airline has been struggling through the economic crisis as well as the well-publicised collapse of Brunei’s Amedeo Corporation.
It is therefore not surprising that talk that RBA may be planning to restart flights into Beijing and possibly Japan was enough to get travel agents in Brunei excited.
But RBA executive director Pengiran Ali Ahmad said nothing was final. “There are no definite plans for expansion, he told TravelWeekly East in Brunei. “Plans will have to be presented to the board.”
He said expansion plans would probably be presented in June and that Australia was a key area for expansion.
“We’re not talking about new destinations, but expanding capacity and it’s all subject to board approval,” he said. “Now is a good time for us to expand especially to Australian destinations. It will help to increase frequencies – we fly just two times per week to Perth. We fly to Brisbane three times per week, if we increase to four it will add flexibility of services between Brunei and Australia.
“We’re also looking at expanding services to Hong Kong. We fly there two times a week – it’s not enough. We need to increase the flexibility.”
He said his biggest priority was to turn RBA into a profit-making operation. “The first phase is to turn around RBA from red to black. Our big goal is to turn around the company. I think we can do that this year. The second phase will include expansion of products and improvements.”
He said the airline was being especially careful and looking at the little details in an attempt to save money. “We’re not cutting flesh to bones. We have a group, TSG, the Turnaround Strategy Group, with divisions looking at revenue, business processing and cost containment. It was set up about 12 months ago. We’ve achieved significant achievements and managed to reduce costs substantially.”
He said the economic crisis forced RBA to do business more efficiently. “Since the economic crisis we’ve come out stronger and smarter. To reduce costs we adjusted capacity. We’ve stopped using Fokker 100 aircraft. When we stopped using Fokkers 100s, we reduced the costs of hiring three different kinds of pilots.”
He said the airline now uses Fokker 75s and 76s “but there’s a strong commonality between the types”.
He said RBA has also saved money by smart negotiating with hotels for crew stays.
With all the consolidation in the industry, does RBA have plans to join any alliances or possibly merge with a bigger airline?
“Everybody does that (ally), but we don’t want to follow everyone. We are very small, but maybe someday we’ll have bilateral agreements with certain airlines,” the airline chief said.
He said RBA had to figure out which systems it wants to use before offering a frequent flyer programme.
“We have not made a choice about which frequent flyer programme to choose. There is urgency to choose which CRS we want to use. We want to defer the frequent flyer programme until we’ve made this decision.”
Pengiran said he wished more airlines would fly into Brunei.
“It will help us, we’ll be more successful if we have more airlines coming in. They’ll bring more people.”