IATA Safety Audit for African Airlines, a Steep Boost – Woode

The chief commercial officer of Africa World Airlines (AWA) Ms. Tosan Katherine-Lois Woode, in this interview with CHUKWUEMEKE IWELUNMO offers an appraisal of the performance, challenges and short-comings of the continent’s aviation sector from an operator’s perspective.

You have worked in the airline sub-sector for 11 years. Why do you think African airlines have stunted growth and what would Africa World Airlines (AWA) do differently to escape this growth challenge?
One of the reasons I accepted the challenge to become the chief commercial officer of the airline was exactly on that premise. I have worked with British Airways, Virgin Nigeria when Virgin Atlantic was running it and I also worked for Virgin Atlantic.
So, I do feel I have a good history when it comes to understanding the preciseness and compliance with the standard of an international airline. So for me I feel we can provide a unique offering through AWA. Now, I would attribute the problems of African airlines to learning, training and development. These are things we should deal with. A lot of African (airlines) do not really understand the key issues to train the human capital who are the huge internal assets. The moment you refuse to give them the required training, learning and development they begin to change your image and suddenly even though you are pumping money into the system, the human aspect could become a liability. Another one we would look at is safety and security and cutting corners because we have not got the amount of investment capital it requires to be able to say “look, I am not going to cut corners.”
For AWA, we are going to fly into Takoradi, which is Ghana’s oil city. And we would like to operate from Takoradi to Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt. But at the moment, we realize that we are slightly short of the runway and Embraer tells us we need a certain amount of length of runway or we take fewer passengers.
They say your flight takes 50 passengers and for you to land on the facility safely, you have to take 30 to 35 passengers. May be, an African airline would say “what are you talking about? We will fill the aircraft up with 50 passengers.”

But we have chosen not to cut corners when it comes to safety. So, does it provide lucrative option when we take less?
These are some of the things all African airlines have committed to in a recent roundtable discussion. They resolved that they would step up their game and adhere to safety and security standards. And to this end, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) said they would open up safety audit for African airlines. It is an expensive audit which a lot of airlines cannot afford to go through to address operational questions.
IATA has pencilled down nine African airlines, including AWA, to be audited. And they taught and trained us for one month. And now AWA is proud that we are the next in line for the actual audit.
So, we are taxiing on the runway, so to speak, with the final IATA Operational Safety Audit (IOSA) programme and we are very optimistic that we would pass it. That is the link between the international and African airlines.
When they see the IATA accreditation they know that you have complied. That would open doors of code sharing, interlining, joint venture, etc for us. Other international airlines would bring the world to us. So with IOSA programme the challenges faced by African airlines will be history.

Already, there are competing airlines on Ghana-Nigeria route. What unique things would AWA bring to make air travellers switch patronage?
I agree that there are competing airlines and we are one of the competitors. If you look carefully the competing airlines traditionally going between the two routes, holding the economic fraternity of the Nigeria-Ghana route have, more often, been Nigerian carriers.
In the early days of Ghana Airways, we had to stop unfortunately and for the past 10 years, it has only been Nigerian registered carriers running that route. And now, we are proud to be the first sustained regional carrier which is a Ghana-registered airline. We are offering a brand that comes out of Ghana. The second part is that we have a unique offering, aircraft type that is a Brazilian Embraer 145; it is a single-cabin special offering of 50 passengers.
We all know that a lot of Nigerians go to school in Ghana. So, we have to take care of them from Nigeria and back in Ghana. The aircraft are between four and five years old and because of that we can give you the required attention it takes as corporate travellers, traders, students. We feel that we can adapt quickly and tailor our needs to special target market.

You intend to deploy shuttle aircraft to the route. But there is a high concentration of Nigerian traders and businessmen in Ghana. How would the airline cater for their needs in terms of ferrying their goods from Nigeria to Ghana and from Ghana to Nigeria?
We have been operating into Nigeria for a better part of one year. From December 9, 2013, we operated right through December 2014. We have studied our market very carefully; we feel that we now have a better offering. We started by erring on the side of caution because we didn’t have so much capacity. But having studied the market, we are coming up with a new concept; we feel that we can take more belly capacity.
So, we are offering our clients between 23 and 32 kilogrammes at a standard price of N6, 000. The next thing we are offering is if you have two of such bags, the price drops by N500. So two bags will be N11, 000 and the big deal is we are allowing a maximum of three extra bags at a price of N3, 000 each which is N15, 000. We know that if we have seven of our required trading customers with a lot of bags, we will work it out with them. So, what we are saying is AWA holds a concept of excess baggage at N6, 000 for the first bag; N5, 500 for the second bag and N5, 000 for the third bag. And that is for the traders; you know we have a large student community attending universities in Ghana and we are there for them too.

How do you handle the marketing aspect of your airline?
We have got something brilliant in this aspect where we feel that the travel agent, we call them travel partners, are our big deal.
When it comes to awareness, when it comes to marketing we have a lot of marketing collateral, gimmicks ad advertising. We are also working very hard with our banking partners. They have a larger reach; they want us to work with them so that they can tell our customers that they can book and bank with them. And how can the customers access us? We have a good product with a good price. Our travel partners can book you from their laptops.
We also go along with the formal airline system but the most important is how an individual can access us. We are working very hard with the Nigerian interswitch, quick teller and all those forms of deployment. So, AWA is going to be accessed through Zenith Bank, interswitch and quick teller system; we will be available on the web link, billing and settlement plan (BSP) and we are doing all these so that accessibility to our products will be seamless.

How would you rate the airline’s one year performance in the Nigerian market?
For one year, we feel that one thing we have been able to keep going is uninterrupted and sustained service from Accra to Lagos and back. Now, we have assessed our operations and I must admit that we did open up a market very aggressively with 14 flights every week. Back in July, we realized that because we were having a few challenges, we had to reduce to seven weekly flights. What we see and what we have done now is to re-strategise. We are going to introduce weekend flights which would present a good offering for our passengers. The Nigerian travelling public in Ghana is very excited to come home on weekends; they can come on Friday and return on Sunday.

How many Nigerian professionals are in the airline’s employ?
There is no Nigerian who serves as a security man in our employ. We have what we call a sharing system. In Nigeria, the staff strength is between 10 and 15 employed directly by AWA while the rest is outsourced. There is no foreign worker in Nigeria here. For AWA, we are local content compliant. Remember, AWA is domiciled in Ghana and we can assure you that if it is what we call ECOWAS persons we have them and they actually tip the scale.