News Backgrounder
Scoot joins the party in Berlin
Singapore Airlines budget arm, Scoot, will add a second European destination to its network in June. With the carrier’s B787 fleet set to grow, more long haul cities are expected to receive the airline’s flights.
May 1st 2018
After a year of successful flying to Athens, Singapore-based Scoot will add Berlin to its network next month. Read More » Why the German capital? It is, Scoot chief commercial officer, Vinod Kannan, told Orient Aviation in a visit to Sydney last month, a city that suits the airline’s image.
“It’s a young city with a lot of millennials, young people. It’s a design city. It has everything. It’s a party city. It has history, it has tech and also is the biggest community of entrepreneurs in Germany,” he said.
Importantly, he added, Scoot is part of the Singapore Airlines group and the parent carrier has a wide network in Europe. “We want to complement that. It is one part of Germany the group has not covered with SIA,” he said.
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“We [SIA] have Frankfurt, Munich and Dusseldorf, but Berlin resonates best with Scoot, given the image, and is a gateway to northern and eastern Europe.”
Apart from Athens and soon Berlin, Scoot also flies to Honolulu, a route it launched last December. It now has a fleet of 16 B787-8s with two more of the type to arrive in time for the Berlin launch and another two to be delivered to the carrier in 2019. That, said Kannan, would open up opportunities for more long-haul routes.
“That will definitely be on the horizon. A lot depends on Athens and Berlin. Athens has been OK so far, but we are looking at Berlin as a bellwether. It is more of a balanced destination. We don’t have a plan for the U.S. West Coast. Putting that aside, we will look at where we can fly.
“Where are we going to use the next two [B787s] in 2019? I can’t tell you yet,” Kannan said, but conceded European destinations not covered by SIA “are definite possibilities”.
As well as its B787s, Scoot operates 24 A320s, which were inherited from low-cost carrier, Tigerair, after the merger of the two airlines last July. It also has ordered 39 A320neos, additions that will double Scoot’s fleet in the next five years. At press time, the airline was operating to 63 destinations in 17 countries.
Kannan, who was vice president network planning at Singapore Airlines before he transferred to Scoot, pointed out through traffic from Australia and the rest of Asia is a key part of the success of its European flights.
“Australia through Singapore is doing very well. The majority of passengers (to Europe) are not originating from Singapore but from other parts of Asia including Australia, which is by far the biggest market supporting Athens. “We think it is going to be a similar profile with Berlin.
Scoot is happy with its merger with Tigerair. “No merger, acquisition or integration is going to be easy, but externally we have done a pretty good job. We tasked ourselves with a very ambitious goal of doing everything in one year, which we managed to do,” he said.
“All the external customer touch points: your customer care, website and mobile have been migrated within that time frame. There were also all the regulatory issues we managed to get through within the year.
“Internally is really the biggest challenge. There are different cultures, a different mindset and different perspectives. But I am happy to say that although it has been a painful exercise, the team has done a great job of putting it together. The team we have at Scoot knows exactly where we are going whether they were from Tiger or from an earlier time at Scoot.
“Scale has doubled. Scoot had 14 aircraft. Immediately, it went to 40. Ways we had in the past had to be done differently. There have been instances where people decided this was not their cup of tea anymore and they left. But those who stayed understand the company vision.”
