The AirAsia Group is a multi-national airline group headquartered in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The group now operates a network of low-cost carrier's including AirAsia, AirAsia X, AirAsia Philippines, Indonesia AirAsia, Thai AirAsia, and AirAsia Japan.
Opportunity
In recent years, rapid economic growth resulted in a burgeoning middle class within Asia’s large population. For the Indonesia AirAsia, Indonesia has 12 million people who travel by air every year against 3 million passengers who fly everyday in the United State. It would call for at least a 5-6-fold increase in capacity. It points to a huge opportunity for AirAsia. The attractiveness of budget airlines is primarily their low ticket prices, which can be as low as 10-20% of those charged by full-service airlines.
AirAsia differentiates its no frills product by offering less features at substantially low fares. However, this strategy will become generic with the entry of low cost carriers waiting in the wings. At that stage, low cost competition will each need to try and “be different”. Limited product differentiation is an opportunity, but must be approached with extreme caution. Anything (like frills) that adds costs and reduces price competitiveness is a bad trade-off. Airasia has the provision of in-flight food and drinks, and online sales of hotel, car, and holiday reservations, as well as travel insurance, and corporate travel services, with its own branded credit card; further increasing brand awareness and value for customers. Increased in fuel cost is likely a threat to AirAsia. However, high fuel prices will squeeze out unprofitable competitors. Being a low cost leader, AirAsia an upper hand because its cost will be still the lowest among all the regional airlines. Thus, AirAsia has a great opportunity to capture some of the existing customers of full service and other low cost airline’s