Nadia Omer became CEO of AirAsia MOVE in October 2023 after several years in executive roles at Cars24, PepsiCo, Nestlé and Procter & Gamble
AirAsia MOVE is an online travel agency launched in 2020 as a subsidiary of AirAsia, now known as Capital A. Based in Southeast Asia, the online travel agency offers bookings from more than 700 airlines and more than 900,000 hotels worldwide, plus ride-hailing, insurance, dining and financial services through BigPay.
This conversation with AirAsia MOVE CEO Nadia Omer has been edited for brevity and clarity. The full discussion is included in the audio link below the text.
Can you start by just helping us understand how AirAsia MOVE fits into the broader AirAsia ecosystem?
When we started AirAsia back in 2001, 2002, as a low-cost carrier, there was a genuine need, because travel was only for the affluent. So there was genuine need for other strata within the pyramid to want to join this boom. … We were able to set up a very profitable low-cost carrier and a huge one in ASEAN. It's bigger than most of the flagship carriers within ASEAN when it comes to travel in this region.
What was really great was we had direct connect with the customers … and every time we remove the middle person from the ecosystem, the inclusivity increases. When we started off … if you just looked randomly at a plane being filled in this region back in 2000, it would be mostly men. And today, 50% of our travelers are women. So every time you remove the middle person and actually democratize it and you make it affordable, you see greater participation from under-represented groups. … Through this we built our largest loyalty program. And we now have databases of up to 10, 20 years in which we know how people have travel, what periods they're traveling, what destinations they like to go.
Now times are changing. There was an era of the dot-coms as well as the airline apps. But today is the era of the OTAs because consumers are looking for more choice. They're not committed to only one carrier. … And they would like the hotel to be part of it as well, and they would like an airport transport part of it as well. So we had to evolve. We have a huge customer database of around 15 million active users, almost 30 million user database. So we are committed to them and we are evolving to serve their needs in the best possible way.
This is where AirAsia MOVE comes in.
Tell us about the type of content and products AirAsia MOVE provides?
We are split into three or four verticals. So we offer flights, and these flight options have AirAsia, but they have other carriers in it as well, because we are committed to giving our customers the best value, and it can be from anywhere. The second one is our hotels and our combo deals. Now this is something really special … which is, you combine your flight and hotel and the deal is amazing and no other OTA can beat us on that deal that we give because of our relationships in which we get access to certain inventories and certain rates that other people do not get access to.
And then we have just started our tickets as well as activities. Because concerts are really coming back strong in ASEAN, and that by itself sometimes becomes a travel motivation. So getting the full package together, you know you have a concert, the flight, the hotel stays all packaged together.
Then we have rides which we are focusing on airports, pick and drops, and later on, maybe in the journey it's going to be linked with our hotel business as well. And lastly, we have the duty-free … select your products before you even get onto the flight and you just pick it up on the flight. … We also have a huge rewards program, about 30 million subscribers there, and that's also integrated into all of our products.
And in August we are actually moving to blockchain. Now blockchain for us is not just about a buzzword. It's actually a genuine customer need. … We want people to use our rewards almost like cash and also between each other.
So what a blockchain does is, firstly, it secures value. … It reports the value at the time of issuance. So there's no dilution happening for the customer as we issue more points. That's number one - secure the value. The other one is that in the blockchain, as you move between one person to the other, the trail of ownership goes with it so there cannot be any dispute or any fraud there. So this is going to be a next big thing for us. A very few loyalty programs are that big and moving on to blockchain, which will make our rewards a currency within the MOVE ecosystem for us. And we also have joined forces with our sister company BigPay. … You get the best exchange rates on BigPay and in the coming future we will start our travel loans as well.
You already offer a lot of products, but can you tell us what you are considering for the future?
Everybody is talking about AI. … We have these ideation sessions and one of the teams that won the ideation session did a trip manager … which will be on our home screen, and you can put a destination and it can create the full itinerary for you, including all the different activities there. And it's an iterative cycle. …
So that's something really exciting. The blockchain is something really exciting. We are also building a social community on our app because we feel that ASEAN [travelers are] going to become more and more conversational as they go into the transactional journey. KOLs' [key opinion leaders] recommendations make a huge difference. So this community social stream is coming up, and we will be offering free seats all the time on it. It's competition to keep you on, because at different times different routes we will be tagging up, “Hey, guys, we have 3 free seats … first one to opt in can pick it up.”
We always hear about how the super app concept really was born in Asia and has really taken hold there. Why do you think that is? Why does it work well there?
Asia is very different from the West, and one of the things is the human interaction is key to it. … There is a higher tendency of wanting more control in the West, and basically saying, when I'm ready, I'll reach out.
Whereas it’s very different in ASEAN. It's people to people. … What people are saying matters much more than what brands are saying in this community. So everything is very, very conversational. So I believe that the super app concept really came from a lot of these conversational chat groups, which became so big that then they became part of the social commerce, and then the fintech payment modules fit into it. So it's just the nature of the customers in Asia. It's more people to people.
Can you explain more about the community-led experience in the app – there’s the gamification piece and a chat piece. Do you find users really engaging with that?
It's just a starting point right now. … Customers are really coming to us right now for their travel needs. Within the travel ecosystem they want to be inspired, you know, show me things and places that I didn't even think about from KOLs who are experts. … So this is how we are building our feed. And gradually, as people start using the app more and more for this, the next journey is going to become more direct in terms of chatting. I don't think we are there right now. So it is a process we have to take. It's going to be different from the chat-based platform. … For us, travel is going to be our heartland. We'll build off. We’ll will the social commerce piece through it, and then move into the one on one chatting for the format of it. So it's a different trajectory you take, depending on at what part or for what need the customers are really using us.
The AirAsia Superapp originally launched in 2020, staring in Malaysia and then you’ve expanded since then. Do you have plans to continue to grow geographically?
In the pandemic travel completely stopped. We had this huge customer base that was not traveling but had other needs. So we kind of pivoted towards the everyday needs of transportation, of food deliveries. But once the pandemic was over and travel was back … we've evolved back into an OTA rather than a super app.
Today we operate in Malaysia, all of ASEAN, plus Australia, China, India. These are our heartlands today. And also north Asia, which is Japan, Korea. And I think for us, for now the focus is going to be here. Our commitment is towards growing our travel business within ASEAN for ASEAN and also for other tourists coming into ASEAN. We want to be the go-to stop for them.
What we want to do differently, though, is today OTAs are just selling inventory. We have just started developing certain products which cater to tourism needs which are unmet because those products require a multi category approach. … We have launched our ASEAN Explore Pass. It’s a first of its kind. For a fixed fee ... it would be about $20, you get to fly unlimited, as well as hotel discount up to 20%, get discounts on your taxi fares and stuff like that, and many other things come in, and there will always be a flight to go somewhere. It may not exactly be the destination that you want to, but maybe it could be a similar one. … So it basically is a spirit of adventure, exploration. It's like a hidden gem. It's great for tourism boards, they love it because … everybody just knows certain places and that's where all the traffic goes in. So all the other communities they're left out of this entire travel revolution which is actually happening in ASEAN. And that's what we're trying to promote. And we are seeing increasingly appetite is much, much more to explore something new, to talk about something that has not been talked about.
What is your customer acquisition strategy – how are you bringing new customers in to get the AirAsia MOVE app and use it for their travels?
When it comes to new customer acquisition, the first one is anybody planning to explore this region, as soon as the searches start to happen, we move through those. We definitely acquire those, and the next one is through the KOLs. So our customer acquisition strategy is for travel enthusiasts and we catch them in terms of their intention when they are browsing. So we target them there, and also through word of mouth, which works really well for us. Eighty percent of our sessions are organic, which is people find us and that's great. That basically means that we are not buying people off. They are actually coming with a genuine need of being there. And that's really important for us to build a sustainable business. In e-commerce as well as a lot of startups it's not that difficult to scale up - it depends on how much money you throw in. However, it is not sustainable. So sustainable, profitable growth is what we want to build, because that is where all parties in the ecosystem benefit. It's about creating shared value rather than growing like a cancer. So I mean, that's something that comes to our mind when we think about growth and expansion.
You touched on the AI trips tool that you're developing. Are there any other ways that you are exploring using AI? Whether internally for your operations, or customer-facing in the app?
The question on AI is a bit like if 10 years back, somebody said, oh, do you use a laptop? Yes, everybody uses a laptop now. It’s going in every dimension. We talked about the customer agenda. It's about predictive modeling, it's about making sure that if a customer is looking for the best deals, it’s going to go through all the algorithms and finding you the best deals. So it's basically a very targeted search which starts happening on our own platform.
... And it's also moving everybody towards a conversational journey, human to human. We got trained on how to use a computer because the computer would not be able to come to exactly our level. Now the AI is being trained to come to the human level. So that's huge, and it's going to be so inclusive for a lot of the population, which has been alienated, especially the elderly, and I think, this is how Asia actually works, which is conversational, human to human. It's going to be a big trend.
Then, internally, we are looking at a lot of repetitive tasks being taken over. For example, we are doing our predictive modeling, or even for our ads. In the past, you just made one ad for the TV, and that went out. With digital coming in, our teams are working on 200 different iterations of the same ad. Now the AI can pick it up, so we just do the key creatives, maybe three, and then all the different iterations are done by AI. They can keep changing tag lines to see which one works for which. So it's like the repetitive tasks are being taken over. Our coding - the beauty of the code is the smaller it is, the better. That you learn. But now you pick up a long code, and you say, shorten it. It just shortens it for you. …
So what it's doing is that a lot of the checks and balances that we had put in at a human level, and especially on the repetitive tasks, that's going away. Because this was, by the way, the most boring part for a lot of humans as well, because we actually had to work like a machine away from our natural inclination. Our natural inclination is to create. And that is we need to focus on, and all the repetitive tasks and quality checks I hope in the future more and more that moves into the AI part of it.
Before we wrap up, I noticed prior to joining AirAsia, you were primarily in the consumer product space – Cars24, Pepsi, Nestle, Procter & Gamble. Anything that sticks out in your mind that you have taken from those experiences that have been applicable in your role as CEO of AirAsia MOVE?
It started with P&G, because P&G is a company that helps you understand how to change human behavior. There's a big science behind it as well, because they're all about category creation, which is inducting new people into a category. Like if people were using soap to wash their hair, now they use shampoo. If they were using unpackaged to package, and that has been the key theme to everything that has happened in my life, and that's where my interest is as well. So when it comes to Nestle, it was all again about conversion - converting people from fizzy drinks at that time to juices, or it is converting people from tea to coffee. So that figure of changing behavior is common across, and it's happening over here as well. So I like categories which are not fully saturated and still you are inducting customers and training them, and also learning from this and evolving yourself. So that's one common theme that goes through.
The second one is I love the power of brand. It's just like creating a new person. And the categories that I've worked on have been again young. So you were actually building the brand. And I love that. … And the third thing that I learned in these companies is about operations, which is, you know, I want go here. How do I make sure that everybody's aligned to it in terms of the everyday target, literally till the last person in the food chain. And this is what they do really well, because I feel that as creative people, at times we have great ideas but we're not able to break it down into smaller portions for others to do it in bite size. … So these are the three things, which is changing habits and behaviors, building brands and operationally being solid and sound to take everybody with us.
