Phee Teik Yeoh, Chief Executive Officer, Vistara, the brand name of the joint venture domestic airline between Tata Sons and Singapore Airline met with BusinessLine late last Friday on the eve of the airline turning one.

As mist started to descend outside, Phee Teik cleared the air on how the one-year-old journey had been and what the plans of the airline are.

Edited excerpts:

How has your year long journey been? What tweaks have you had to make?

Before I talk about tweaks let me talk about what we have done well and what we will reinforce because at the end of the day it is a journey of reinforcing the positives. Keep repeating what you have done right, what the customer might like and, of course, where we could have got it wrong we tweak.

The statistics speak for themselves. Our on time record continues to surprise even those who have mastered the art of achieving on time punctuality. Since our inauguration our OTP has been consistently above 90 per cent from January 2015, smack in the middle of the fog season. And we had very few aircraft then.

When you have very few aircraft your ability to maintain a high OTP is not as good as someone who has more aircraft. Because OTP in the Indian aviation context is measured by the percentage of flights that take off within15 minutes of delay so when you know that your flight is going to be delayed you quickly try and rob one aircraft from one of your other departures which does not need to take off and then swing it to the flight that is getting delayed.

The act of juggling is pretty limited if you do not have many aircraft.

Why should a customer choose Vistara when you have eight flights a day between Delhi and Mumbai as compared to IndiGo which gives me greater flexibility as it has more flights and fares? Besides you are yet not in Tamil Nadu, J&K, and connect only 12 cities as compared to 36 by IndiGo and over 60 by Air India?

Scale is something but not everything in the aviation world; not just in India. I am glad that passengers are going not just for scale. Besides choice of departure and arrival, passengers will also be valuing without a doubt the quality of service, pricing consistency of delivery in terms of punctuality. It is all these factors put into play after which one decides that I will go for this particular airline.

Your question would have been more relevant when we were barely offering two services a day between Delhi and Mumbai; we started with that. At that point in time, agreed, we only offered one departure in the morning and evening so you did not have a choice. But today we have eight services a day.

But 18?

When you are two versus 18 it makes a lot of difference. But after you achieve a certain minimum it does not really matter whether you have 16 versus 18, or 10 versus 18 because they are not looking for departures every single hour of the window. They do not need that kind of variedness.

Is that what your survey of your passengers tells you?

In fact, ever since we stepped up our frequency of services between Delhi and Mumbai from two to eight (and very soon it will go up when we induct more aircraft from May) we have seen that we are getting more than our fair share of the capacity.

It is about market share versus capacity. Initially when we flew only two times we were not even getting our fair share. That explains to us that scale is relevant. But only up to a certain point. It is no use offering a lot of choices if you out price yourself or are not consistent in your operations or service excellence.

What is your definition of quality?

If one is going for quality of service the benchmark is the Singapore Airlines benchmark of quality of service.

Could you quantify this for an average passenger?

Two-third of travellers in India or probably more than two-third travellers travel on low cost carriers. That is a fact. Fact two is that low cost carriers thrive through pricing because of the dominance of LCCs in the domestic market.

What is the business model of online travel agent (OTA)? It is typically sorting the flights by pricing. So it is a price-led business model. So OTA goes hand in hand with LCCs perfectly well.

You probably felt that economy class is a commodity. I do not blame you for that. If we do not try hard enough economy class can quickly degenerate into a commodity product very soon. And dominated by 70 per cent of capacity it can even engender a belief that nobody is willing to pay a slight premium. I am not surprised because if you ask two-thirds of our passengers who have been travelling on LCCs they may have also been lulled into believing that is the way it is and that is the way it will be.

It is the small little details. In other mature markets that I have operated in things like this do not even win you a compliment. When you are a passenger of SIA you are not going to write about cabin crew turning on the light when you were reading. What it tells you is that these are things that have not even been experienced before (in India). There are so many travellers who have not experienced such niceties.

The only time anyone tried something like this they went bankrupt…..

You are talking about Kingfisher right? We are no Kingfisher. We know what went wrong. Right from the start cost leadership is paramount for us. This is one of our three key pillars of success. The other two being operation and service excellence.

Doesn’t frequency of flights on a particular sector count?

Frequency is a monotonous thing. So it will come naturally. Frequency increases new destinations. But what I am trying to draw your attention in 2016 is that you will see the unveiling of a number of significant products and services that will further transform the perception of Indian travellers about flying.

This is our grand vision but transforming is not an easy task. I am not saying I have done it before, I will do it again. It will be slow and steady but we remain committed to this vision. When all this happens scale may not be as important any more. They choose us because it is a wholesome journey. End to end. Hopefully, bringing back the joy to flying.

What are you doing on cost leadership?

First and foremost you can look at our employee productivity. There are many measures but one of the most common here is the number of employees per aircraft. On this one we are one of the lowest. Despite nine aircraft our ratio has been below 100.

Will I be correct in saying that Vistara is an airline that believes in reaching a customer’s heart through his stomach?

You are talking about food. No, we are trying to reach their hearts through all the senses. The visual, the feel, the textile -- everything. Food is one way. Actually, it did not come about by chance. We did an intensive customer survey. One of the questions we asked travellers was what is your biggest pique when it comes to flying domestic? Two things came up …. They hated the check in experience and they hated the food and beverages on board.

So we focused a lot on check in and food. We engaged TAJ-SAT to come up with innovative sets of menus. Let us bring a refreshing change to this. We gave them a challenge: why not get a little bit of global twist to the way we cook the Indian local fare?

Is bringing in Sanjiv Kapoor from SpiceJet a part of the tweaking to make Vistara more Indian? Till now its two faces have been Giam Ming Toh, Chief Commercial Officer, and Phee Teik

There are other faces also.

So are you moving back now?

The answer is no. A flat no. When the team was sent from SIA there were 12 of us. I led a team of 11.

Together with the expertise injected by Tata’s in the area of legal, HR, Finance, Company Secretary among others we formed a management committee. The team that I got from SIA was sent with a specific purpose--- set up the airline, to get us the AOP which satisfied DGCA requirements.

This is where SIA which has run the business was best equipped to demonstrate and give the DGCA the assurance to secure the AOP. So we got in a team of a few engineers and a few pilots and from SIA we also got in a team to quickly gear up the sales and marketing.

The team of 11 was brought for a purpose and they accomplished the task of setting up the airline. Not just setting it up but to ensure that they are leaving behind an organisation, a department, or a division with robust policies and more importantly a team that is able to take on the baton and run. They are supposed to ensure sustainability of the organisation.

What happens if 5/20 is removed?

If 5/20 is removed we will as quickly as possible launch international operations. But gearing up for international operations is not a piece of cake. In fact, it is more complex than gearing up for domestic operations. I am not trying to boast but what we have gone through in terms of setting up the airline for domestic travel is nothing compared to what we will be going through when we gear up for international operations, simply because the product and service complexity will multiply because there is a lot more that we can do on international sectors, especially with long flying time.

There is very little you can do to wow the audience in a short one-and-half-hour flight. Most of the time you do not even have the opportunity to engage the customer.

When we start flying international and the flights are going to be longer than 2-3 hours there is a lot of opportunity and we want to introduce more product and service innovations to wow our audience.

We know what efforts are needed to run a well-oiled machinery for international operations as SIA is all international. We recognise that it is not just going to be a walk in the park.

Though it may take some time before we can launch our operations.

Any time frame?

There are a few variables that will influence how soon we can launch. One obviously is we must be ready with the products and services we have in mind. Then how long do you train?

Another factor which will determine when we can launch especially if we have to secure widebody aircraft. You can easily say that it is a 12-month cycle. It is not only aircraft it is also what goes into the interiors. That is the most challenging bit.

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