Tiger Airways Challenge

Maybe we will soon be seeing the end of delayed flights and cancellations with some of the budget airlines. The Singaporean airline, Tiger Airways, has challenged Jetstar and AirAsia to a competition to see which airline is the most punctual. Proud of their own on-time performance, which grew to 84% in April, Tiger has set a strict criteria and dared the airlines to compete against them.

To obtain its monthly On-Time-Performance figures, Tiger judges punctuality as no later than 15 minutes of the scheduled arrival, whereas other airlines generally use rescheduled timings. They also measure all departure and arrival times for all its flights, whilst others include only departure times from selected bases.

Rosalynn Tay is the Managing Director for Tiger Airways Singapore, “We are not surprised that other LCCs can claim high OTP figures if they are based on less stringent criteria than Tiger Airways. As the biggest LCC in Singapore, we are proud to take the lead in being transparent and pushing ourselves harder. We are also proud to have achieved such high levels of operational efficiency.”

If Jetstar and AirAsia do take up the challenge then it is us, as the consumers, who will be the winners. AirAsia has some great promotions and many people take up their offers of free and heavily discounted flights, however if they have a connection to catch then most will rather book with the more reliable, but costlier airlines, such as Thai Airways and Bangkok Air.