Category: Travel

I am going to be leaving to Dubai tonight for a photoshoot. Should be back Wednesday night. I believe the hotel has internet access so I should be able to post from there.

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.

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?

Just got an SMS from Jazeera Airways, tickets to Dubai or Bahrain are now KD5. [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.

I just got the following SMS from Jazeera Airways:

Be at the Jazeera Airways ticket desk at the Kuwait Airport tomorrow at 4PM wearing a “I Love Lebanon” t-shirt and you will be flown to Beirut immediatly one-way. Only 163 seats available.

My favorite publisher is Phaidon, their books are of extremely high standard and their design and typography is unmatched. I just found out they are publishing the Wallpaper* City Guides and I really want to have the full collection. Sadly the first guide I want is for Montreal but that comes out October 2007 so the first city guide I will have to get is Amsterdam. One guide sells for $8.95 but you can buy the first set of 20 for $143 which isn’t bad at all. [Link]

You can start booking your tickets to Beirut on Jazeera Airways. Not all days are available yet and the days that are available are filling up fast. [Link]

While looking for an image of Kuwait Airways for the post below I found this cool site that has pictures of sugar packets from a whole bunch of airlines around the world. [Link]

Here is also a link to a gallery I found before with pictures of spoons from various airlines around the world. [Link]

I was just checking the blog story from KUWAIT and he has a Kuwait Airways advert which says they won Best Airlines in the Middle East and South Africa. That didn’t sound right, I figured maybe since the headline of the ad says “Our last victory” it could be a victory from the 80’s or something. So, I went and checked the Kuwait Airways website and guess what, I found a press release from late May stating they won Best Airlines in the Middle East and North Africa! How did that happen? They must have been the only airline that participated. Also notice their ad says South Africa but their website says North Africa.

Kuwait Airways ad on story from Kuwait [Link]
Press release on Kuwait Airways website [Link]

My brother is online now from Turkey. He left Lebanon yesterday with the Canadian Embassy on a crappy ferry boat and today, 20 hours later he arrived to Turkey. They had to sleep on the floor on the ferry and it was a fucked trip. He is now at a highschool stadium where surprisingly they have WIFI. This is what he had to say about the evacuation so far:

20 hours on a fucking ferry boat
it fucking sucks
seriously
it’s so bad
i will show you pictures when i get to kuwait
you will think i was on an african refugee boat
they’re so unorganized
those who aren’t going to canada, have to wait for the rest of the people to go to the airport to pick up luggage
then we have to find our way to Istanbul
i hate canada

update: my brother was very tired and exhausted when he wrote that.

My younger brother who is in Lebanon at the moment is going to be evacuated by the Canadian embassy in the next few days. According to him they will be evacuated by ship to Larnaca (Cyprus) and from there he will take a flight back to Kuwait. He is very excited about getting on the ship..

In regards to the post below, Nat was able to get a ticket to Kuwait because she used her Beirut to Kuwait ticket. Her original Jazeera Airways flight which was supposed to take off from Beirut on Sunday took off from Damascus instead. I was worried Jazeera would cancel her ticket “by mistake” but they didn’t and honored her ticket and even her seat number.

I have already mentioned a whole bunch of times on this blog how great Jazeera Airways is and their recent actions in regard to the war in Lebanon has been extraordinary.

So yesterday was my day off. I didn’t go in to work or do any posting, instead I decided to stay home with Nat who was still exhausted from her evacuation. Thanks to everyone who left comments welcoming her, she will most probably post about her experience today. One thing I realized is that leaving Lebanon isn’t a problem, its the Syrian airport that is.

According to a Kuwaiti lady Nat spoke to at the Damascus airport, it seems some Kuwaitis are really pissed off at the Kuwait embassy. According to that lady, the Kuwaiti embassy dropped them off at the airport with the promise they would be able to find a plane back to Kuwait but she had been in the airport for 2 day and she still is on the waiting list. There are also no representatives from the Kuwaiti embassy at the airport either, they were just dropped off and left alone. Hopefully the lady is back in Kuwait now and that there are no more people stuck like that at the airport.

update: just spoke to a friend who arrived yesterday from Damascus. She told me that she was able to get on an earlier Jazeera flight because they has 16 seats free so I guess there shouldn’t be any more Kuwaitis stuck waiting for a vacant seat.

As I mentioned earlier today Nat arrived at the Damascus airport around 1:40PM. Her flight takes off at 9PM so she wasn’t able to check in until after 7PM. I spoke to her on the phone and she told me the airport is a disaster. Its understaffed, overcrowded and it seems like there is no AC even. She told me a lot of Gulf nationals were panicking and having nervous breakdowns and that the situation at the airport is unbearable.