Hilton hides; Singapore Airlines in trouble; Copy Emirates businessplan.
FOXTROTS
Fox – sly. Trots – left-leaning (Trotsky) plus its more insalubrious meaning.
Foxtrots – leading the industry in a dance.
November 26 2011
Hilton hides; Singapore Airlines in trouble; Copy Emirates businessplan.
[] One of my friends once said “No-one got fired for hiring IBM.”
There seems to be a related case with Hilton. The Travel Business Analyst newsletter has detailed shortcomings with its China Travel To Europe study, including some apparent faults. Hilton has shown no interest in learning about this, presumably because no-one is going to get fired for hiring the prestigious SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London) to do the study.
SOAS may be prestigious, but they appear not to have much general insight into the China outbound market.
Does this mean that no-one at Hilton wants to uncover any shortcomings – because it has already paid its money, got a lot of publicity, etc? It would obviously be awkward if all that were undone; maybe heads would roll.
The odd thing is that presumably Hilton is going to put down more money, and create new strategies, on apparently flawed data.
[] The Singapore Airlines group is in trouble – not least with the latest figures I calculate, which show 2% growth at SIA compared with the market’s 11%. One of my many proposals is to launch Scoot* sooner than planned – April 2012 at the latest.
*The clever name (if you are aged under-9) for its longhaul low-fare subsidiary.
[] Why has no European airline copied the one-stop-shop businessplan of Emirates for travel to North America at least, if not the Americas? Finnair and Scandinavian are probably in the best geographical position to do that to North America.
What is ‘that’? One-stop Lyon-Winnipeg, for instance, or Bruges-Portland. It’s all in my extra-ordinarily-successful book (albeit not yet written), ‘How to copy Emirates and Make a Million’.
The Fox
