Oasis wins an award
December 28, 2007
I see that Oasis has won an award. Cathay must be a bit worried, because they have come up with a curious style of advert that tries to make out that they are a budget airline (except, of course, so much better, lah). And, yes, they only use to advertise services to Vancouver and London (the two Oasis destinations).
Meanwhile, Oasis appear to be trying to move their Business Class upmarket (with price increases to match, no doubt):
businessOasis passengers will soon receive the ultimate business class service experience, with increased one-to-one service from flight crew, incorporating, amongst other new touches, a full split meal service.
Oasis is moving away from the standard on board catering service and instead offering its businessOasis passengers a quality restaurant-like service, where each course of the meal is presented, then cleared, before the next is delivered. After the main course the crew will offer a service trolley featuring sumptuous dessert and cheese rather than pre-plated choices, so the customer can select the after-meal delights for themselves.
The meal will be provided on high quality new crockery, with new cutlery and glassware, and a stylish, custom-made Oasis mug.
The new mug will feature in a new and luxurious tea and coffee service, where a range of biodynamic and fair-trade certified teas will be offered in a wooden presentation box for passengers to choose their tea of choice: English Breakfast, Earl Grey, Green, Peppermint, Lemon Valerian or Chinese Tea.
Ho hum - biodynamic tea in a wooden box. I still think that they'd be better advised to keep it simple.
I also found an interesting article about Oasis at FinanceAsia.com:
The business plan for Oasis Hong Kong Airlines – now just over one-year old - was conceived by its joint founder and CEO Steve Miller during a stint as representative for airports such as Frankfurt and Amsterdam. Part of his work involved monitoring passenger flows between Hong Kong and Europe.
Miller says, that over a period of three or four years, he noticed a huge increase in the number of third-country carriers operating into Hong Kong – airlines from Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand all taking passengers via their own hubs to Europe. He calculated these passengers amounted to about 20% of the total volume – some 200,000 passengers a year. The same thing was happening with carriers from Taiwan, Japan and Korea on the North American route.
“I then took the fares that these airlines were charging and plugged them into a non-stop service with a 747-400 and found, that if you could keep the costs relatively under control, you could make reasonable money. And that was the original business model for Oasis.”
Clearly the key is keeping costs under control - and of course a startup airline has obvious advantages here
Cathay, British Airways and Virgin operate with a fleet utilisation of about 12 hours a day whereas Oasis utilises its aircraft an average of 15.5 hours a day by operating on a very tight schedule.
"One 747-400 can actually do 4.5 round trips to London a week. So we have three aircraft doing a daily round trip to London and six a week to Vancouver. That’s a good utilisation, much better than the others but also leaves ample time for maintenance.”
Well, maybe it doesn't. There have been a few comments published in the SCMP from readers who suffered lengthy delays to departure times for flights between London and Hong Kong. For a while, Oasis used to publish their "on-time percentage" very prominently on their website and in an advert on page 2 of the SCMP (above the weather information). Strangely enough the last figures they published were for May, and since then they have kept this data rather quiet. I think we can all draw our own conclusions about that...
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