Airasia Marketing Channels
Tune Air Sdn. Bhd. (Private Limited) officially acquired AirAsia from HICOM Holdings (99.25%) and Mofaz Air Sdn. Bhd. (0.75%) in December 2001 under the wings of charismatic leader, Dato Sri Dr. Tony Fernandes, a finance graduate from the London School of Economics, former financial controller for Virgin Communications and former vice president of South East Asia for Warner Music group (Poon & Waring, 2010). His initial vision is to making air travel affordable with everyone with introducing no-frills, discount airline that would boost air travel in ASEAN (Lovelock, Patterson & Walker, 2007). He and his three other partners founder Tune Air Sdn. Bhd. and purchased 99.25% equity stake with only RM1 which had two aircrafts and RM40 million in debt (Lovelock, Patterson & Walker, 2007; Forbes.com, 2010). Within one year of acquiring AirAsia, they managed to turn the company into a profitable one and fully repaid the debt previously indebted by HICOM Holdings and Mofaz Air Sdn. Bhd.
Fast forward to the present, AirAsia currently serving network routes through more than over 20 countries domestically and internationally with over 70 destinations (AirAsia.com, 2010). AirAsia provides convenience to their customers by offering online bookings system through their easy to navigate webpage as well accepting credit card payment through telephone bookings (Lovelock, Patterson & Walker, 2007). Furthermore, AirAsia was the first airline in the ASEAN region to introduce revolutionary ticketless as well as first in the world to introduce SMS booking (Lovelock, Patterson & Walker, 2007). In catering new markets around the region, AirAsia introduced multilingual website for countries that they are currently having network routes with (Lovelock, Patterson & Walker, 2007).
The channels that AirAsia currently using are through their own online booking system in their website without using any external agency, telephone bookings with their