The new managing director of Monarch Airlines has outlined his plans to bring “humanity and warmth” back to flying in Europe.
Andrew Swaffield, who joined the family-owned airline in April, said he believes the two qualities have disappeared from European air travel.
“It’s like a race to the bottom in terms of the cheapest and the biggest and the most efficient and sometimes the customer gets lost in that process,” he said. “We’re small enough to think that we don’t have to be like that.”
He said Monarch has already made some customer improvements in response to customer feedback, including posting 45 staff at its main nine airports to assist customers.
“The feedback tells us that our customers are increasingly finding the airport experience very difficult, so we have put Monarch employees in the airports, in Monarch uniforms, whose job is purely to help customers,” he said.
“We are measuring how it’s going down and so far it’s been entirely positive.”
He said the next stage was to improve communication with customers, particularly when things go wrong.
“We’re working more proactively on that at the moment, which I know is not particularly new for the airline industry, but we know that communicating openly with customers about what is going on, especially with delays or technical or ground handling problems, is the way forward.
He said Monarch was also continually tweaking its schedules to adapt to customer trends.
“It’s no longer just about Saturday departures and two-week stays, it’s about flying midweek or for long weekends and taking more, but shorter trips,” he said. “We need to make sure our schedules reflect these trends.”
Swaffield, who joined from the airline loyalty group Avios, said price is still key at the internet booking stage but then other factors kick in.
“European airlines seats are a commodity and at the internet stage people don’t differentiate on anything but price, but once you’ve got somebody experiencing something better, they will come back, especially when they are travelling with their loved ones,” he said.
“We know from our customer data that people are interested in service and where Monarch can bring a bit more humanity into that service, that will make a difference to the life time loyalty.”
Monarch has today been awarded ‘WorldHost Recognised Business’ status after 1,690 of its staff, including cabin crew, pilots, engineers and office staff, undertook an intensive 10-day WorldHost customer service training programme.
