With more leisure-driven tourists taking up its most expensive seats, Singapore Airlines Ltd. is flying nearly full first- and business-class cabins even without the return of corporate travel.
Goh Choon Phong, Chief Executive Officer said the lag in corporate traffic – a key staple of earnings was not much of an immediate concern, since planes are still packed, keeping post-Covid profitability near record levels.
Goh said they were seeing some of that travel that didn’t used to necessary travel premium classes move to premium classes, and they’re all full ahead of the annual Association of Asia Pacific Airlines meeting in Singapore, which the flag carrier was hosting.
Singapore Airlines, ranked the world’s best airline by Skytrax in 2023, is operating at around 85 per cent of pre-Covid levels, and expects to return to full capacity in the 2024-25 fiscal year, which starts on April 1. The carrier posted its second-biggest quarterly profit on record, on Tuesday with strong demand for flights helping to keep airfares elevated.
During Covid, Singapore was among the first countries in Asia to reopen its borders, helping its main airline recover faster than the likes of Hong Kong’s Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd., which also didn’t have a domestic market to fall back on during the pandemic.
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Separately, Goh stated that Singapore Air was working on generative artificial intelligence developments that could boost revenue. The airline has discovered 90 uses for AI across the business, and a trial effort to respond to customers faster yielded time savings of 75 per cent, down to two days from eight.
Goh has a background in computer science and electrical engineering, and his graduate research studies were in AI, so he is familiar with the topic.
He said that he certainly thought there were opportunities to improve productivity and therefore reduce costs. “There are opportunities for revenue generation. Exactly what they are, I don’t think I want to share at the moment. I would not want to alert anyone about what we’re doing.”
