What a year!!

Probably the most difficult year of modern times, 2020 has left us with plenty of bad aftertaste, but also with a bunch of lessons learnt and a lot of new knowledge that we will carry with us through the next years to come.

We have reinvented ourselves in so many ways that the learnings that we collected will accompany us forever.

Diversify and Innovate

To be 100% transparent, the diversification initiatives of AirAsia started before the pandemic kickedin, we wanted to reach more people, fulfill more dreams, enable excluded communities to access places where they had never been, deliver international products to people that couldn’t reach them before, allow credits to people that did not have access to financial instruments… We wanted to be inclusive and build products for everyone, products that were connecting people to people.

• Can you imagine booking a flight from Lombok to the sunny Spanish coast city of Valencia? We made it possible together with Kiwi.com and partnering with airlines like Turkish Airlines or Qatar Airways. Now you can reach everywhere buying through Airasia App
• Best Price Guarantee Flight+Hotel Snap(s) benefiting of a wide network of flights and hotel partners in the region, return flight + 5 star hotels for 2 nights at 99 MYR, only we can do it
• Who would have thought that we would create a Pass that you could fly as much for a year paying a set amount, we also did this and not only in Malaysia, we launched it in Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines and Indonesia, more than 240,000 people can enjoy Unlimited Flights (once flights resume). We probably gave more than one headache to a couple of our Revenue Management guys, but together we made it work better and better with every launch
• Contactless travel? Here we go: We built a platform that enables contactless check in, modified our app to enable uploading of health documents, incorporated AI to recognize and standardize the processes across countries…

‘Innovate fast, fail fast, learn fast, hear the customer fast… then repeat ’

Own your Future

These times of scarcity, make us come with imaginative approaches to problems that we probably were not aware of, allowing us to identify true partners. We took advantage of the situation to increase the possibilities of our own channels, increase our customer happiness capabilities, create engagement, own our own platforms

• March brought us a surge of cancelations, queries, requests… our teams and focus shifted to serve our customers, we improved our AVA technology, automated a lot of processes to serve the clients needs, mobilize personnel to every department that volunteered to help with the cancelation cases, and we did all this as a team and a huge family.
• We launched our own chat and community product: Connect used by 260K users. We aim to create unique experiences for our customers, where they can engage with others, share experiences, even meet the rest of the passengers on the plane if you like, for an unforgettable trip.
• During November and December, we launched an e-commerce platform that connected to our AirAsia Login, and OMS allows us to spin off new e-commerce marketplaces within days: multimarket, multicurrency, multi language… now we own the future of our e-commerce initiatives. The roll out started in Malaysia and the Philippines but is reaching Thailand and Indonesia soon.

‘Partner with the best, learn every day, but drive your own future’

People First, let’s mine Talent

4 years ago, when Declan Hogan first proposed to me to join AirAsia, I started looking for speeches of Tony Fernandes. And I found him repeating a sentence 3–4 times in the multiple youtube videos that got me buying into AirAsia and that I want to personally make a mantra for myself: ‘Take care of your people, your people will take care of your customer’.

During this year we suffered a lot, but we learnt a lot in this aspect; I might have made some mistakes but all of the AirAsia team helped go through the journey. Some achievements that I am proud of were:

• Rolling out campus hiring strategies across India, with two batches of +10 people joining us from the best colleges: IIT, NIT, VIT, BITS… (yes, now I know more about Indian university system now than about any other university system in the world)
• Creating Talent Density by transforming those green-field talents into full fledge engineers that contribute and grow on daily basis without the organization
• Having a pool of mentors that guide and train, as their learn themselves and deliver all the initiatives while progressing on the job, self-less, careful, motivated and passionate, could not be more grateful
• Creating Talent Diversity Pool: I am a believer on diversity and inclusion, we have plenty of talent available in the Asian region (Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, India, Vietnam, Pakistan, China…) but we have been able to keep and attract talent from all over the world to our tech teams: Spanish, Egyptians, Syrians, Argentinans, Americans, Bangladeshis…
• We have our first squad in China that will be driving WeChat related initiatives through our very own MiniApp, with researchers, product managers and engineers working from Guangzhou
• Creation of our own training pills: starting by Machine Learning and continuing soon with ReactNative and Devops, we have to own our own learning path and progress towards a much robust skillset backbone that allows the organization to engineer solutions that are scalable, reusable and valuable for our customers

‘ Internally Focused: People are our biggest asset, put them in the center of everything’

From a bunch of products to a promising SuperApp platform:

At the beginning of the year, urgent and important was easy to put on a list, in the following months probably that list was shaken/mixed/steered/bent/broken/pasted-back-together… the pandemic toyed around with us.

But, we were lucky to have resilient enough teams, that helped us all to navigate it and worked in urgent and important stuff at the same time, and putting us in a very much improved situation to face the challenges in front of us for this 2021:

• A very small team, managed to unify AirAsia log-experience across all the different ecosystem and upgrade our member profile to be suitable to host ecommerce experiences
• One (well, to be totally honest two: one for flights, one for the rest) Payment and Order Management Software to rule them all. The Payments and Order Teams partnered in an amazing way to balance Businesses, Payment Methods and other priorities to allow us the capability of selling anything beyond flights. Please welcome NUCLEUS.
• A lot of effort was put to launch, NUDGE, our very own Personalization Platform, that through a set of Machine Learning and AI driven algorithms, tailors the experience of all our customers in every touch-point
• We introduced also PHOENIX our Design System that allows to have coherence and scalability of our User Experience > bye bye little 2019 frankenstein UI
• Rolling COSMOS across Digital Marketing, Product, Tech and Data organizations for Publishing and Templating thousands of experiences within minutes
• A successful collaboration between product, engineering and data manifested into our own Experimentation platform, ARBITER, that will allow us to iterate and fail faster going forward in order to provide the most valuable and impactful experiences to our customers

‘ Fast, Faster, Fastest starts by Good, Better, Best’