Browny

OK so for what it is worth, not much probably, here are some of the key things that the conference should be considering and actioning:

1. Stopping direct flights between UK and Yemen is ridiculous – unless there is a REAL reason for doing it.

Terror threats isnt a real reason. There are only 2 flights to London from Sanaa a week. If there is a real reason such as upgrading technology and security infrastructure, why not be honest about it? Why not say: “we are having to stop flights until we put in place better security / technology systems”. Its better than using the ‘fear’ routine.

Stopping flights is stopping: innovation, business, tourism, money, families etc etc from reaching Yemen. This is not doing ‘The British’ reputation any good whatsoever.

Action – Start flights again.

2. Be honest about the AbdulMutalleb underpants bomb.

OK so it is ALLEGED that he said in an INTERROGATION that he was trained and given the bomb in Yemen. Alleged. Alleged. Is it really true that he managed to smuggle this between airports across several countries including Yemen, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Ghana, Netherlands and multiple aircraft …… and then not detonate it correctly.

Lets get real – HE GOT THE BOMB IN WEST AFRICA.

Action – think before you speak

3. Relieving poverty and preventing Al Qaeda recruitment / stopping suicide bombers IS NOT CONNECTED.

OK so, the 9/11 attackers, the 7/7 attackers, the Bali, Casablanca, Madrid bombers were all westernised and not poor people. They were FUNDED by people with FUNDS. PLEASE KEEP IT REAL!! Poor people in Yemen are not going to blow up planes or chop off peoples’ heads. They ARE going to support CERTAIN GROUPS OF PEOPLE who can promise them a better future IN YEMEN.

HM UK Gov admit that there are 1000s of people in the UK, who are BRITISH, who could probably be suicide bombers. they were born and brought up in the UK.They are rich compared to their islamic brothers and sisters.

(Lets also note that there are not any Yemeni suicide bombers in the UK. The suicide bombers are mainly Pakistani and Saudi. Think about that for a second. Then wonder what the hell we are doing starting wars and sacrificing blood and treasure in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

Action – stop trying to fool people. Be honest about the real benefits of poverty reduction.

4. What Yemen Needs

OK, Yemen needs the following:

- training and education

- job opportunities through inward investment

- better IT infrastructure

- a countrywide electricity supply

- innovative water production technologies

- elimination of corruption

Unfortunately this conference will produce the usual diplomatic double talk involving promises of money but nothing substantial with regard to how the money will be spent and how the benefits of this investment will be measured.

A message to TIM TORLOT (UK ambassador to Yemen) – Tim, you are a nice guy and a smart guy. This is a time to make yourself a hero. This is your moment. Ignore the politics and global power stuggle and KEEP IT REAL for the Yemeni people who respect you and admire you.

Al Qaeda in Arabian Peninsula

So, Obama and Brown are going to save the world from Yemeni and Yemen influenced nasties. The media is loving being able to fill space and 24 hour news graphics with lots of scary details about how Yemen is now home to various head choppers and plane bombers. OK so i love it here and hate hearing anything bad about the place, but yes there are some people here who we, the west, have decided to not to like, namely islamists who dont like us and would like to see either a new caliphate or, simply, have the US and friends withdraw all influence in the Arab world by not supporting Israel. But lets not get too much into that. I would like to give my personal view on the headlines appearing across the world concerning what has been happening in Yemen in the last couple of weeks.

• So UK-USA are worried that there are  several 100 al qaeda ‘fighters’ hanging out in Yemen. I wonder how many al qaeda sympathisers are currently residing within European and US borders – several 1000 i suspect.  So, firstly, lets not get ourselves distracted from the threats in our own countries. The majority of Yemenis are poor and uneducated. They do not make reliable people to get on planes and go and blow themselves up. Even for money, they probably wouldn’t want to. They like to spend their afternoons chewing qat and talking.

• Embassies are closed due to threats. Now, the UK embassy is basically hidden behind a mountain. The US embassy has a perimeter fence that almost stretches to Dubai. I don’t think anyone of any competence could attack them. These embassies are closed so that various diplomatic, military and spook types can have meetings and ‘clean down’ the offices. This is so they can have a complete review of everyone working there and all the communications in and out. A good idea.

What Is Really Going On? Aren’t there loads of crazies coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan to plan attacks on the west?

The moves by the UK and US are to ensure that the Saudi brand of salafi-wahabi islamic rule doesn’t topple the Nationalist – Sunni rule of President Saleh. Make no mistake, Saleh has been doing business with the returning Yemeni sunni insurgents from Iraq (and ex Iraqi military now living in Yemen) by giving them jobs in the army and sending them to fight the Shia Houtis in the North. The fear is that they will then be funded and financed by their Saudi friends and turn against him from the inside. You could draw parallels with Pakistan and how the islamist nasties managed to get themselves deep within the political and militarily organization. The western worry in Yemen is that it has already happened. Seemingly, the southern Yemen provinces of Shabwa and Abyan are already home to some ‘al qaeda’ fighters and politically there are islamist sympathisers in the Sanaa majlis.

The UK-US Game Plan

So, the UK-US fear is not people from the middle of nowhere in Yemen jumping on a plane and blowing up their pants again, the fear is an end game comprising a pseudo-coup by well financed and supported islamists with the nationalist backing of influential Yemeni tribes who have grievances against the Sanaa government. Such an islamist state could  turn Yemen into an unstable islamic Saudi protectorate run by Imams, that could once again be called South Arabia but larger than the original. Western control of the red sea would be in the hands of people who the west ‘can’t do business with’.

So, under the cover of  protecting us in London or New York – which i accept could be genuine but it isn’t the only reason – our governments are looking to protect their geo-political CURRENT and FUTURE interests in Yemen and the Red Sea.

What’s About To Happen? What Should NOT Happen?

1. There will be a rush of money to protect President Saleh and ensure that there are elections which he can win. Saleh is about to become the new Musharraf.
2. There will be drone strikes and constant alerts about terrorist threats in and out of Yemen. It is likely there will be innocent victims.
3. Iran will stoke up the propaganda war.
4. The west has to ensure that none of the western military materiel is used against the southern Yemenis who have their own beef with the government which isn’t religious or terrorism related.
5. Somalia will be brought into it and be blamed for providing fighters and resources due to their amazing skills of cargo vessel piracy.
6. The party will still continue at The Sailors Club in Aden and anyone who has any sense will be in there supping cold Heineken and throwing their riyals around. Like me.

Ryanair seat pocket safety card joke

For those of you who have never heard of Ryanair, it is a low cost airline, based in Ireland. They are one of the world’s largest airlines with just under 58m passengers carried in 2008 and with a market cap bigger than British Airways, Virgin, United Airlines and all the other publically traded big name airlines.

Ryanair is foreasting a net profit of 388m euros for this financial year. It has a cash balance of 2.5bn euros and a net debt of just 105m euros. It is a robust business capable of surviving price wars and cost increases.

I have flown Ryanair frequently whilst i have been in Europe this year and taken a keen interest in watching how the company does business. There are Ryanair business lessons for any business – large, small or ‘me’preneurial.

Here are some observations.

1. Aggressive cost squeezing.

I use squeezing here instead of cutting. An airline can only cut so many costs. Ryanair squeezes. Like many of the budget airlines they have disrupted the traditional airline service model – they have done that at the ‘front end’ with pricing (more of that later), but also at the ‘back end’ with services required to operate planes, provide passenger services and service planes at airports. Ryanair now charges for online check in, issuing boarding passes at airports, checking in hold baggage and wheelchairs. Ryanair outsources a lot of operational functions. I noticed at some airports that Ryanair’s baggage handler supplier manually loads bags. They don’t use the usual conveyor belt. Perhaps this makes them cheaper to use?

I dont know how much they have squeezed their suppliers, but clearly they have looked to shift these costs directly onto the passenger. Perhaps Ryanair pays the company who manages customer’s hold baggage,  a piece rate for each item loaded and unloaded?

Business lesson – can suppliers deliver the same service but differently? Is there scope for gearing up and scaling down outsourcing in line with demand? Can flat rate overheads be broken up and turned into piece rate? Ryanair is flexible enough in their supplier base to be able to reduce flight numbers without bearing the associated continued overheads.

2.Have a PR machine operating in overdrive

Anything and everything is newsworthy as far as Ryanair is concerned. From spoof stories such as charging for toilet use or adding a fat tax onto overweight passengers, to more business orientated stories such as the recent announcement of cutting services from Stansted and Machester Airports in the winter 09 (and blaming the airport operators in the process) – a service reduction which they always do every winter anyway.

The Ryanair brand is front and centre most times of the year and therefore is on the mind of potential customers.

Business Lesson – there is always some news worth promoting, even if it means recycling old ‘non stories’ with a new angle year after year. You dont need a glamor girl to front your stunts, Michael O’Leary (Ryanair CEO) is no oil painting and is happy pratting around. In fact i met him once, when i was dressed as a Viking promoting the opening morning of Ryanair’s first flight to Sweden in 1998.

3. Clever pricing

Ryanair is famous for its free or ultracheap pricing. This is used in all geographical markets. It is used to raise awareness in print ads, emails and is very effective i would guess at driving traffic to their websites. The Ryanair flight network is so vast in Europe that is very likely most customer’s destinations are served.

A number of factors go into Ryanair’s ability to offer such low pricing – clever carve up of the traditional business model, removing third party operating costs from the ticket price and showing them as a named variable line item at checkout, use of yield, capacity and demand modeling to create a fluid price, leasing of no frills Boeing and Airbus aircraft.

Business Lesson – there is nothing more powerful than the word ‘free’ in sales. It makes people do strange things. Create a free offer with upsells and cross sells at the backend to generate more revenue than you would have done had you charged in the first place.

4. Time and Availablity Scarcity

Ryanair always has a scarcity offer running. It is usually a dual scarcity tactic involving the limited number of ultra cheap flights (availability) that have to be booked by a certain date (time). “1 million seats at £1 have to be booked by 31st July 2009″ was the subject of a recent Ryanair emailing on the 25th July. The same email with a different end date will be sent around the sametime in August, September etc.

Business lesson – Scarcity tactics when used correctly are very effective. Anyone selling anything should use scarcity somewhere in the promotional mix. Limited availability and time are often used together in sales where customers are pre-planning in advance. The subconcious message is, ‘buy this now, it is an amazing deal, it may not be here for long’. Combine with a ‘FREE!’ offer and you are on a sure fire winner.

5. Upsells, Cross Sells and Trap Sells

Here’s a list of the Ryanair extras at checkout:

travel insurance
sports baggage
normal baggage
priority boarding
online check-in
airport assistance.

Here’s a list of the trap sells, these can catch you out at anytime:

adding sports baggage to your itinerary after you have booked and checking online – this one voids your online check in meaning you then have to pay the ‘boarding pass reissue fee’ at the airport on top of your extra fees for the baggage. Should have remembered about your bike when you were booking the cycling trip in France!

boarding pass reissue fee – not managed to check in online and print out your boarding pass? Pay £40 for another one at the airport.

overweight baggage – clever one this. The Ryanair limit on hold baggage is 15kilos. That is about enough for one of the medium size trolly bags – you know the ones that come in a set of 3 – cabin, medium and coffin. From what i have seen at several Ryanair baggage drops, and this is nearly always women, if you have a coffin size hold bag full, it would weigh about 20kilos (enough to not give you a problem on most airlines). You are faced having to pay an additional 5 kilos.

In flight there is no complimentary catering of course, so you are then paying for your own food and drink. Not too bad actually and Ryanair has seemingly cleverly invented some excellent ‘me too’ brand names to make us all feel at home: “Saile and Sagba Gourmet Coffee”, “Saile and Sagba Preium Wine”, “Bullseye Baggies Spirits” – booze in a little foil bag offered 2 for the price of 1.

Business Lessons – allow people to pick and choose what they want. Flying hand baggage only to Ibiza, i am happy that my £19.99 ticket price isnt covering the cost of an entire family’s fortnight of pants, tacky tshirts, white shirts, bucket and spades and Primark dresses.

6. Integrated Partner Offers

Made easy by the web, but also used by Ryanair offline, the concept of promoting complimentary offers that are ‘integrated’ into the Ryanair website during and after the checkout process and also in their on board magazine, in return for commissions can add nicely to the bottom line. Ryanair is promoting offers (that are discounted) for Stansted Express, car parking, car hire, bus services, hotels, phone cards and the, er, smokeless cigarette.

Business lesson – promote aligned products and services with an additional offer such as a discount in return for a commission. The commission maybe as low as £10, but when you expose it to 58million passengers at a pretty low conversion rate of 1%, Ryanair could be generating an additional £5,800,000 in pure profit, per year, per offer.

Summary:

Heres why Ryanair is successful and has bucket loads of euros in the bank:

1. Create your business around a single proposition that you are known for and then increase its scope. Cheap flights. £1 tickets. Free tickets …. anywhere in Europe to all Europeans distributed in local language, electronically.

2. Neutralise the ‘experience’. Ryanair is not ultra profitable because people have a great inflight meal or enjoyed a sumptuous first class lounge with chauffeur to and from the airport. It is profitable because they deliver an experience of cheap, competitively priced tickets and a service to fly people between 2 points in a way that people neither rave about nor overly complain about.

3. Draw a ‘free line’. Utilise the power of free, or almost free (£1) because free does wonderous things. Free is an evergreen proposition. Free crosses class boundaries. Everyone loves something free. Psychologically, it makes people behave irrationally. Can your business offer something free?

4. Behind the ‘free line’ you need to make money. This is where integration marketing comes into play.  Does your business have a backend of upsells and cross sells? My last flight with Ryanair started with a ‘free’ ticket and ended up costing me over £150. Cross sell your own products and then bring in partner offers at a steep discount for which you get a commission.

5. People like transparency and to get what they pay for. If your business un-necesarily over delivers at the expense of other customers with lesser demands, why not re-model it and at the sametime reduce your overheads. Is your outsourcing directly inline with customer’s demand?

I quite often get asked what it is like to fly Yemenia. Is it safe? being the real point of the question. I have flown in first class and economy class on Yemenia over 30 times, on routes inside Yemen and also to London, Rome, Dubai and Jeddah.

My first experience of Yemenia was on a flight to London. The plane was ancient, like something from the 1970s. It matches the prevailing Yemen fashion which is for anything brown, cream or orange and worn like a 1970s football player. Life On Mars comes to mind.

Upon final approach to Heathrow, the cockpit security door flew open, and continued to open and close with incredible velocity until we touched down.  This was great in that, sitting towards the front of the plane, i managed to see the entire landing as if i was sat just behind the pilot. It also made me think about the quality of the fleet. Regardless, i got off the plane smiling to myself at having this final bit of ‘Yemen Madness’, as i arrived in London.

One of the more infamous (not for safety reasons) Yemenia routes is Heathrow – Cairo – Sanaa. This flight leaves LHR at around 2100 and stops in Cairo (unannounced) at about 0400 local. Now, the reason for this flight is that it acts as a shuttle service taking people backwards and forwards between Yemen and Egypt’s much better hospital facilities. I nickname it the Sanaa Sanitorium Shuttle. Having boarded at Heathrow and taken off with a plane only a quarter full, you stretch out and try to sleep. Little do you know that the plane is going to stop at Cairo, where every Yemeni with a limb missing, who has been blinded or suffering from some form of acute non stop shaking and shouting complex, is about to board the plane and fill every remaining seat. The final 2 hours to Sanaa are hell beyond description.

But, flying Yemenia, anything goes: A quick fag in flight with the air stewardesses at the back of the plane. Qat can quite often be had and chewed and shared Yemeni style during the over night flights. The cabin crew dont give a shit about anything and try to serve the food before the plane has reached the end of the take off runway, so they can then sleep the remainder of the flight. There’s no Emirates style ICE system, only good old fashioned Egyptian comedy on colour faded overhead monitors. Limits on cabin baggage dont seem to apply to Yemenia flights so you carry on board your whole baggage collection. They dont serve alcohol, but you can bring your own on board and the staff will keep it cold for you and serve it with your chicken and rice.

The joy of flying Yemenia has, of course, been that fact that you are with Yemenis. They are very, unintentionally, funny people. Highlights  are usually: none of them know, nor are they told, that seat numbers are on their boarding pass. Few of them can read English numbers anyway, therefore, it takes 3 times as long to board a plane with Yemenis on. Also, whenever you arrive in a place like Dubai’s airport from Yemen, one of the first things you have to do is to use an escalator. For a lot of Yemenis, this is a new experience and they tend to crowd around to watch how it is done before trying it themselves. Lastly, and my favourite, is when there is a temporary stop over, like in Mukallah or Aden, before the plane heads onto Sanaa. For the passengers who want to, a smoke would seem like an appropriate thing to do during the 45 minutes waiting. So they all head to the doors and down the stairs to the tarmac for a fag. Watching the chasing cabin staff trying to get them back on the plane is a real hoot!

Any bad news involving Yemen is always bad news for Yemen. It is bad enough having the terrorist and failed state tag, but now focus has shifted to the blame game about Yemen’s national airline’s safety record and rumors that at least one of their planes has been banned from French airspace.

Taking this further, one could investigate the Saudi connection in the Yemenia corporate structure (they are joint owners/investors). From what i have heard in Yemen, the Saudis aren’t high on the best buddies list. This is a very strained relationship at the moment.

Prayers to friends and family of those lost and particularly to the staff of Yemenia airlines.

Subject of the chew was mainly to do with Iran elections and the Saa’da kidnapping.

The latest theories on the kidnapping – in which actually only 3 bodies have been discovered not known publically what has happened to the other people – are as follows:

1. Jihadist freelancers funded by Saudis popped over the border from a camp in Saudi and did it

2. Known sunni mercenaries – used by the Yemen government to help out in the battle with (shia) Houti – who have jihadist Al Qaeda sympathies, were inspired to do the kidnapping by a ‘radical cleric’ (hate that phrase as it is so western media, but had to use it as i am being lazy) during Friday prayers in Saa’da.

3. Al Houti kidnapped them, Yemen military bungled a rescue and shot 3 of the group – the 2 germans and the Korean.

More gossip from Qat chews next month.