Category: Interesting

This site has articles on every letter of the alphabet and talks about their origins. Its actually really interesting. [Link]

This is a video from Dove’s campaign for real beauty where you see a girl get a heavy makeup and then “fixed” in photoshop before she’s beautiful enough for the ad. [Link] #

Introducing: International Direct by Amazon!
International Direct offers Amazon customers a unique service: providing duty and tax estimation during checkout and customs clearance by the courier on your behalf. Your order arrives at your door without surprise duty charges. International Direct is also a great way to send gifts overseas. International Direct currently provides service to the following countries: Australia, Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand and United Arab Emirates.

Currently Kuwait isn’t on the list but since UAE and Saudi Arabia are then Kuwait could be next. [Link]

Hello everyone, my name is Fawaz and I am responsible for marketing communication at Jazeera Airways, in addition to being an amateur blogger of course. We have been reading your questions about Jazeera Airways on this blog over the past few months. Questions that ranged from “how can we afford fares as low as KD 5?” To questions about our brand name. In an effort to answer all your questions, we recently asked Mark to gather questions you had for Jazeera Airways and in return we promised him that we would answer all of them, exclusively on this blog. Lets start

Mark: How can you afford to offer super low fares?

This is a great question that I will answer in two parts. First, we prefer to fly our planes full of travelers paying less per seat rather than flying with less travelers paying more. Other airlines prefer high fares and less passengers, which does not make sense to us. Why would they want to impact less people? For us, we enjoy flying people and being part of their lives.

The second part involves our business model that works to achieve high efficency and a lower operational cost base. In other words, we do more with less. We achieve our high efficiency by employing

1. state of the art technology to streamline processes
2. hardworking, multitasking, highly motivated team

In sum, we can afford super low fares because our business model is based on volume more than yield, and because we depend on leading technologies and great team to lower our cost.

Follow-up: How are you able to lower your cost?

We are able to maintain a lower cost base and high level of quality and safety through three main ways:

1- Recruitment- We recruit highly motivated and committed team members. This is crucial as it has direct impact on day-to-day cost. Being able to wear different ‘hats’ (so to speak) and do the work of several people is a quality we seek in and build in our team members. That’s why we call our people our ‘high flyers’.

2- Aircraft utilization – Aircraft on the ground do not make money, so we keep our aircraft in the air where they do make money. We achieve this through quick turn-arounds at the gate. Our planes arrive at a destination, wait for our travelers to disembark, board return travelers, and fly back to base ready to take off again in less than 45 minutes.

3- A fleet of single-type fleet: the Airbus A320.

If you had Porsche and a Ferrari and Lamborghini in your drive way, you would need three different specialized garages to service them with three different mechanics and three different spare parts inventories. On the other hand, if you had three Porsches you would only need to contract a single garage to service all three and your maintenance costs would be much lower. Aircraft are the same, though much more sophisticated. Allow me to elaborate.

If an airline had an A320, an A310, an A340, and a 777, they would need certified captains, first officers, cabin crew for each type of aircraft. In this case, if a 777 pilot falls sick with the flu, an A320 pilot cannot just jump in the captain’s seat of a 777 unless she is trained on a 777. Because of this, airlines with multiple aircraft types in their fleet need to have more pilots to cover scenarios like this, more engineers who do nothing but wait for someone to get sick, and spare parts inventories to cover all types. This creates redundancies and inneficiency.

In our case, we have an all-A320 fleet. We do not need to hire more crew since any of our crew can jump in any of our aircraft and take-off and any of our engineers is licensed to work on any of our aircraft, and our spare parts inventory covers all our aircraft.

4- Investment in Technology – By investing heavily into technology, we were able to raise efficiency, reduce operational cost and drive the price of tickets down even further. We currently employ over a dozen world class technology systems and tools that range from the booking systems we use to satellite aircraft monitoring that tells us the status and integrity of each aircraft while it is in the air no matter where it is on earth, and automatically dispatches support teams and parts to the destination airport if the situation required. These are only some of the benefits of having world class Lufthansa Technik engineers and technology working with us and for us.

I am a huge fan of the Rambo movies and when I heard they were coming out with part 4 I couldn’t have been any happier. Then I found out that Matthew Fox who plays Dr Jack Shepherd on LOST was going to the be the lead bad guy in Rambo IV I was like wow, thats crazy. Now I just found out that Jack Bauer who plays Kiefer Sutherland in real life is also going to be in Rambo IV. The movie is going to come out next year, I wonder who else will end up starring in it.

I am sure at one time or another you tried purchasing an item using your K-Net or Visa card and the merchant asked from you an extra fee because you are using one of these cards. They would give you the excuse that Visa or K-Net charge them a certain amount for every transaction using these cards and that you need to pay it. Well here is what you the consumer needs to know.

First lets start with K-Net. K-Net is owned by the local banks in Kuwait. They do NOT charge the merchant any transaction fee. So if an item costs KD10 and you pay using your K-Net card, the merchant will get KD10. They will not be charged a single fils by K-Net. This is a fact and you can contact 2431280 if you need any further information on this. If a store tells you that they will have to charge you extra because you are paying with K-Net then you need to report that store to K-Net using the number above.

Now Visa is a different story. Visa DOES charge the merchant 4% for every transaction. This means if you buy an item for KD10, the merchant receives KD9.600. Although the merchant pays 4% for every transaction they do NOT have the right to pass on that 4% to you. According to Visa the merchant should not charge the customer for a Visa transaction and neither are they allowed to set a minimum amount in which you could use your Visa card with. So even if the item you are buying costs 100fils, you can pay with you Visa card. In case a store does try to make you pay the 4% transaction fee, report them to your local bank and they will take care of it. If you would like more information regarding Visa, you will also need to contact your local bank.

Hope this information was helpful.

Yesterday I got an email from a reader of my blog who works at Jazeera Airways. He read some of the comments on the post 5KD to Bahrain and Dubai and noticed many people had questions about the airline. So, he has volunteered to answer any questions you put forward to him about the airlines. I will take all your questions which you can post below in the comments section and I then will forward it to him.

I will start by asking the first question: Does Jazeera Airways have any plans of expanding their flights to Europe and North America?

I was back at TriStar last night with Nat because she need to adjust her training schedule. While there I showed her the Pocket Bike they had on display. At first she thought it was for young kids but I explained to her that teenagers and adults actually ride it and not kids. She thought I was pulling her leg, so when we got back home I showed her some videos from YouTube and everyone riding the bike was either a teen or an adult. I figured maybe other people don’t know what Pocket Bikes are so below are some videos and a link to Wikipedia with info on Pocket Bikes. TriStar are selling the 49cc Pocket Bike which can hit speeds of up to 100km/h for KD190. Price might be negotiable I didn’t ask.

Here is the first video
Here is the second video
Here is the Wikipedia page

Hmmmm, looks cool, I “might” try this at home. [Video] #

The end result is really horrifying! [Video]

There is a girl who hasn’t changed physically or mentally for 12 years now. The girl is still 9 months old even though she is supposed to be 12 years old. She has a condition that has no name and no other person has this condition. She is stuck being 9 months old forever. There is a video of her and more info after the jump. [Link] #

Here is a video of a convoy in Iraq that made a wrong turn and went down a dead end road. On the way back out things turn to shit real fast. The army did an investigation into this but say they lost the report. Also Halliburton fired this guy because he got shot. [Video] #

This is very sad news, Alan Fletcher an incredibly talented Graphic Designer passed away on the 21st of September. I can’t believe this news wasn’t more publicized. Alan Fletcher was a founding member of the design agency Pentagram and is among the most influential figures in British graphic design history. I posted about him previously when I wrote about the Commercial Bank of Kuwait logo. This is really really sad news. If you never read my post on the CBK logo then you should since there is a very nice piece written by Alan Fletcher where he talks about his experience coming to Kuwait and the idea behind the logo. I can’t believe he is dead! [Link]

Jazeera Airways put up pictures taken at the aiport yesterday because of their “Fly to Beirut for FREE” campaign. Chairman and CEO Marwan Boodai was actually at the airport himself handing out the free tickets. [Pictures]

Note: They now started a 75% off campaign.