Tiger Airways of Singapore is a reliable low cost carrier in Singapore to serve the Asia Pacific Region and address the needs of the rising budget travel among travellers. The airline was incorporated on December 12, 2003, and began their first flight in September 2004. Based at Singapore's Changi International Airport, destinations currently encompass airports within a five-hour flying radius of Singapore. It is currently the largest low-cost airline operating out of Singapore in terms of passengers carried.
The airline was the first to operate from the Budget Terminal in Changi Airport on March 26, 2006, in order to achieve operating-cost savings. The business model is modelled after Europe's successful Ryanair, which uses its very low cost base to offer very low fares. This is done by scrutinising every single aspect of the business to remove non-essential costs but at the same time not cutting any corners in passenger safety, security and punctuality.
The Tiger Aviation Group's shareholders are: Singapore Airlines Limited (49%); Indigo Partners LLC, the investment firm founded by Bill Franke (24%); Irelandia Investments Limited, the private investment arm of Tony Ryan and family (16%); and Temasek Holdings Pte Ltd (11%). With Singapore Airlines having a stake in the airline, TigerAirways would occasionally fill in the gap when SIA drops its services from certain destinations.
In 2007, the airline established its new subsidiary Tiger Airways Australia Ptd Ltd. Tiger Airways Australia will use their Australian domestic network to support an expanded international presence to compete against Virgin Blue and Qantas/Jetstar. They are also planning to start a Korean-based budget airline joint venturing with Incheon Metropolitan City, flying to destinations in Japan, China, Mongolia and the Russian Far East.
Tiger Airways has reported losses in every financial year since its founding in 2004. First profitability was recorded 4 years later at S$37.8 million (revenue S$231 million) in year ending March 31, 2008.
Website purposes
Their website www.TigerAirways.com is the airline's main storefront for ticket sales. Having no standard brick and mortar structure for their frontline business, they are able to reach out further to people from worldwide. Without ".sg", their domain name also serves to enhance the company's image of being international instead of a local airline.
Having 85% of their flights booked directly from their website, they are able to save on sale and distribution costs. Also, ticket-less travel saves on print and distribution of paper tickets. This differentiates them from other airlines that also sell air tickets over the counter. By providing most updated information related to flying overseas on a single source, custormers will always be informed of the latest deals and packages offered and therefore make wiser decisions. It provides a one stop station for travellers to plan an overseas trip, with accompanying services like hotels, insurance and car rentals.
Apart from the main purpose of making sales using the internet as a medium, they can also allow the public to gain a better understanding of the company and therefore act as a useful source for recruitment as well. With their contact numbers and hot lines readily available on the site, they are able to extend additional services to customers that require more information than is available from the website. This not only provide more quality service to consumers, the company can also cut down on unnecessary repetition of inquiries and make better use of their human resource.
Website Features
It's a business-to-consumer business model. The website aims to reach out to customers and make sales through their virtual storefront without physical money transactions. Payment is limited to credit cards (MasterCard and Visa) and vouchers.
Filling up of private information is secured withVeriSign SSL Certificate. Information exchanged with other websites beginning with https will be encrypted using SSL before transmission. Also, credit card's cvv number is required for extra security. When making payment, the website logs on to the user's computer ip address. This allows for any tracing backs if required.
They are powered by Navitaire's reservation system, which implements information technology and business process solutions for their clients. It now powers the world's largest airline Internet booking engine. Airlines using Navitaire's Open Skies reservation system booked more than US$11.6 billion in travel over the Internet in 2006 - more than Internet giant Amazon.com's 2006 online sales.
Design
Website's home page shows places they fly to on a world map, it is easy to check at first glance. The first thing readers are required to do is to choose their nationality and language.This caters to people from worldwide and not just local Singaporeans, and therefore helps to reach out to the global market and create a global brand for the company. The unified colour scheme in orange of the entire website, especially the tiger stripes at the top page helps to strengthen the company's identity and create a stronger brand image.
Website interface is easy to use with clear navigation around the website at the top bar and left side of all pages, providing a standardized structure for the website. Main services like booking, travel information, travel services, flight information and help services can be easily seen. Temporary packages and deals are advertised in flash in box format, easily catching consumers' attention. Latest news regarding the airline is posted in marquee scrolling format below the advertisement, adding more variety to the website. Other information like details on flight dates and timings are also shown in box format, therefore it allows readers to distinguish one information from the other.
The downside of the website design is that due to the large margin at both sides of the webpage (seen from screenshot above), there is a poor use of spaces on every pages. Words and paragraphs are squeezed into smaller fonts and can be hard to read at times.
Overall, the design is user friendly and information is easy to locate from the website.
Strength
At the start, the website allows the travellers to choose multi-region languages and thus the travellers have no problem with legibility. The whole purchasing process is a breeze, only requiring 6 simple steps that can be accomplished within 15 minutes. One do not even need an account or membership to purchase a ticket. An Electronic-ticket will be issued upon payment, so if need be, travellers can print them out for more security. Customers' IP addresses are also marked and displayed to prevent any discrepancies.
It even allows the travellers to choose their seating arrangement, which is non-existent in their rival companies. In addition, all the bookings are flexible - seating arrangements can be altered, so are travelling date and time. The different prices and time of flights are displayed strategically so just with one look, travellers can define the difference in prices and time. Multiple-bookings are also possible so travellers can hop from one country to another with no difficulty.Travellers can really feel the freedom and flexibility offered by Tiger-airways, which is often hard to achieve in an orthodox travel environment.
There's apparently no loopholes in the capturing of information. Once you miss out any required details, the system will prompt you upon submission. If you book an return ticket and the time of arrival and departure is too close to be possible to make it on time, the system will also block it and a reminder will pop up.
Additional information and services such as insurance, hotel, location maps etc, are also part of their website's offers, which make travelling even easier. Photographs of actual locations are also provided for references. However, no reviews or feedbacks can be obtained from the travellers themselves, which we analysed the reason behind it could be to avoid congestions in the website. Reviews of hotels, venues, are often provided to give more accurate feedback to the travellers. For example, http://www.hotelclub.com/, http://www.asiarooms.com/, etc, have review columns.
Special arrangements are made with travel agencies and hence, another source of sales are built as tickets can be booked from the participating travel agencies. Their agents can also use the website to log in to their intranet system.
The most attractive attribute is the competitive price that they have set in the market. With just $19 almost all year round just to fly China, it is hard to beat in terms of prices. They are arguably the cheapest to fly.
Top ensure that their services and punctuality will not leave any disappointment in their customers, they gain viewers' confidence by displaying their performance status like "On-Time Performance Charts" and their awards in the website.
Weaknesses
Sometimes the travel insurance takes a while to process as they calculate the premiums, after reading through long, small paragraphs of words. If applied in a rush, the travellers may not be confirmed if they have successfully applied the insurance, which can be very controversial if something bad happens overseas.
The same problem occurs in the "vehicle hire" page, which takes a while to get to the page with cars available for rental, after going through a few pages of selection process. It could get frustrating sometimes.
Probably the first airline to do so - travellers actually have to pay for their luggage separately according to weight, which is considered absurd.
The major descriptions and informations are in rather small fonts, which can be difficult to read at times.
Any special highlights
1) The website features advertisement links on the front page that are not related to their own website. This reduces their own advertisement space but instead they earn from other advertisers’ links. (Refer to figure under "Design")
2) Their website came up first under Google search for "singapore budget airlines". This implies that the website actually has more traffic linked to singapore budget airlines than other budget airlines like jetstar asia.
