Of all the things that Gopinath held dear to his vision of the airline, the fact that it be a pioneer in cost-cutting—bare-bones and borderline frugal air travel—was paramount. He charged passengers for water, did away with seat numbers and paid his air hostesses more so that they would clean the toilets at the end of a flight, doing away with cleaners. The results showed: Air Deccan was associated with filthy planes, crowded gates and chaotic boarding.
Since the Mallya takeover, which has eventually resulted in the UB Group owning 46% of the airline after a well-received open offer, the airline has pegged its future on a transformation, both of its product, and how the airline is perceived by customers.
“We’ve addressed various process related issues to get the operations a lot more robust than in the past and separately, we have launched an image makeover exercise,” said Sundaram.
In effect, the airline is trying to shake off its old image, the image of the Gopinath days.
It has added leather seats to its planes, many of which are now painted in red and white livery similar to that of Kingfisher Airlines. It gives away free Kingfisher mineral water.
And then, the final reversal: Some of the planes may be fitted with food heaters, so that people can pay for hot meals on flights. The meals and the new flashier outfits for air hostesses, especially, are extremes from Deccan, as was run by Gopinath, who said in an interview in May that “we are not in the gourmet business, we are not in the modelling business; we are in the transportation business.”
Most of these changes, said a Deccan official, are coming directly from Mallya, who has made no secret of his disdain for low-cost airlines, both as a business and as a travel experience. The bet, said this official, was that if the transformation was done quickly enough, customers will start associating Deccan with Kingfisher Airlines’ lush full-service experience and might be willing to pay more for tickets on a Deccan flight. “People are happier with the service, and with the product attributes,” said Sundaram. “If (that means) I can increase yields, I surely will.”
That transformation has not come cheaply and it has yet to yield any results. It will cost more than $1 million (about Rs4 crore) for the entire fleet to be repainted, and the airline is not sharing estimates of how much the rest of the image makeover will cost. In the last quarter, which ended September, Deccan’s losses mounted—at Rs253 crore, its largest quarterly loss ever—while revenues grew 24%.
mehul.s@livemint.com