Future-proof ... Strategic Airlines says it has new procedures to help passengers during disruptions.
Strategic Airlines says it has learnt lessons from a fiasco last month affecting hundreds of passengers, writes Clive Dorman.
Australia's newest airline has pledged to revise its customer service after hundreds of passengers were stranded in Phuket, Thailand, for up to a week.
A Strategic Airlines Airbus A330 flying from Brisbane to Phuket on June 16 had to be diverted to the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, for what was originally hoped to be a short stop while a failed electrical generator part was replaced. However, the plane was grounded in KL for four days because the part had to be sent from France.
Strategic Airlines chartered a plane to take the stranded holidaymakers to Phuket but customers trying to get home from Phuket were given several times to turn up at the airport in the following days for flights that didn't materialise.
A number of them took the case to the Thai media, complaining that Strategic didn't have a system in place to properly deal with the disruption.
The airline says it provided free accommodation to all stranded passengers, fully refunded their tickets and offered them a free future trip on Strategic.
The airline's chief of commercial, Damien Vasta, estimates the stranding of passengers cost the airline more than $1 million and has prompted permanent changes in procedures to handle similar situations in the future.
"It's been a lesson learned and we apologise," Vasta says. "All the excuses that we might have had only go so far when you're disrupting passengers. Certainly this has been an eye-opener for us to understand exactly what passengers require."
Vasta says the airline has engaged a call centre, separate from its own, to handle the surge in calls that would follow an aircraft grounding, as well as better co-ordinating its use of websites, SMS and social media to keep passengers informed.
"We consider ourselves a full-service carrier and that doesn't just mean the service you get on board," Vasta says. "We're absolutely committed to ensuring we get through these growing pains.
"We do realise we have to get this right now because, if we do have disgruntled passengers next time, they may not give us another chance.
"We've taken a policy decision that, wherever possible, we will put one of our own staff on any flight that has in any way changed, where accommodation may be required because of a disrupted service. We'll have a representative of the airline to chaperone them, to make sure their questions are answered so they feel they have a direct conduit to the business."
Strategic Airlines was launched last year as an airline after an earlier iteration as an aviation contractor to the Australian Defence Department. It flies from Melbourne and Brisbane to Phuket and from Brisbane to Denpasar, Bali, as well as to regional cities in Queensland and Western Australia. Sydney is not serviced.
The airlines will rebrand itself in the next few months as it prepares to launch new holiday flights from Australia.
It has six Airbus A320s and one Airbus A330-300 wide-body jet. It will take delivery of a second Airbus A330 in November and a third in the first three months of next year to start flights from its Brisbane base to Honolulu, Hawaii, and on as-yet unspecified routes from Australia to either Shanghai or Beijing.
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