We interview Con Korfiatis, CEO of Oman Air – oneworld, fleet changes, dropping First and more
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When people discuss airlines in the Middle East they often gloss over Oman Air. In recent years the ME3 – which refers to Emirates, Qatar Airways and Etihad – have been joined by Riyadh Air, which is dominating headlines and interest as it gears up for its first flights next year (read our interview with CEO Tony Douglas here).
But turn a corner in the Arabian peninsula and you’ll find Muscat, home to Oman Air. Like the country it represents, it operates on a vastly different model to its neighbours, which focus on connecting Europe and the Americas with Asia and Africa.
With a fleet of just 35 aircraft, the airline operates on a smaller scale and has recently been undergoing a restructuring and transformation process to pull it into modern ways of working.
To find out more, I spoke to Con Korfiatis who was appointed CEO in May 2024. Con has spent 30 years at flyadeal, Citilink, Singapore Airlines and Qantas. Korfiatis is Australian and still has a friendly Aussie accent despite, presumably, having lived outside of the country for many years!
Oman as a destination
To start with Oman Air is to start with Oman, a country that, like its airline, is often overlooked.
One thing that sets Oman apart is what Con calls its “extremely unique tourism assets.” Like the UAE and Qatar, Oman does have vast deserts. But it’s home to a much more varied landscape. “You can’t say, ‘Well, we went to there and it’s the same’. It’s not what you’ll experience in Oman.”
“I was living in Saudi for seven years and had no clue what was right next door. It’s kind of embarrassing to say that now, but I say that to make the point. I was blown away by the country and how unique it is and its beauty.
“I mean, there’s fjords in the north. You’ve got rugged mountains with the most beautiful vistas, and, you know, granite rock and incredible hikes and wadis. And then you’ve got islands like the Maldives with white sand and a reef of coloured fish and whales, turtles and dolphins.”
It’s not just natural beauty in Oman.
“The airline is really built on the core of what the whole Oman stands for, and something we call the Omani service culture. The things I hear most about Oman is just how friendly the people are.
“The airline, preceding me, did a wonderful job of getting that culture into the airline, and it’s the core of our business. Despite the number of nationalities that work here, we’ve been able to achieve that even with the people we’ve brought in. I think it’s the DNA of the culture that makes us more unique. And it’s been winning for its crew, for its food, for its lounges, for its hard product, all of them.
“So you know, from that point of view, coming to an outstanding organization and country, the negative is that awareness, which needs work.”
Oman Air’s transformation journey
So far, Oman Air has a strong culture and unique offer it can sell to tourists. What’s holding it back?
“We are a 30+ year old legacy airline that’s never come into the modern age era from a business point of view. Not not so much from what our customers see, but more by what allows us to continue to invest in the airline and grow and try to order more aircraft. We still need to be able to justify ourselves economically and we haven’t done a good job with that. Our losses have been quite public.
“We’re at a low level of digitisation, very old school in the way we went around things, more traditional marketing, not really going after the today’s consumer that we’re looking for. Network planning based on poor principles, poor contracts, poor productivity. So we’re on a journey to fix that. We’re about a year into a three-to-four year program so far and it’s going according to plan. There’s still a lot of heavy lifting to do going forward, so we’re not done yet.”
A streamlined fleet
The restructuring program became very public earlier this year (and before Con joined the airline) when Oman Air announced it was retiring its A330s, formerly a core part of the long haul fleet.
“Fleet is at the core of every airline transformation I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s the easiest place to make a significant impact very, very quickly.
“We had huge fleet complexity. We had 20 wide body aircraft, six different subtypes, which is insane, you know. So we’ve simplified the wide body fleet around the newest, most fuel efficient, most comfortable aircraft and taken out the older A330s, which we’ve leased out and are actually selling.
“And in these in our narrow bodies, we have 737NGs and 737MAXs, mostly MAXs by the third quarter next year. The NGs will have gone back off lease and will be an all-MAX fleet. So it’s really an efficient fleet: 737MAX and Boeing 787-9s.”
Cutting down the fleet required rethinking the route network too.
“We dropped routes we were losing a lot of money on, not necessarily routes that had poor volume, but where the yield was so bad for us. Our cost base was so high and that’s really part of our core problem.
“So we’ve rejigged the network, deployed the capacity we’ve got to the right places. We’re actually getting more productivity out of the network. We’ve just introduced our Northern Winter schedules. It just came in last week. We’ve got new flights to Moscow, the Maldives, Zurich and Rome, which starts next month, all selling extremely well. Planes are very full.”
A lot of routes previously operated by A330 widebodies – with proper lie-flat beds in business class – are now being flown by 737s in short haul configurations.
“Business class has a hard shell product. So you have a good product, but it’s not a flat bed. When we ordered that product, the thinking was that the 737s would do three, four hour flights. Now we’re actually finding it’s good route opening product for long haul sectors as well.
“So we are having a look at whether we need to upgrade the front end to put a flatbed in, so that we can use it for the longer sectors and our customers have the same experience that they have on the wide bodies. So that’s work in progress right now. We haven’t made a decision, but that’s where our mind is going, and hopefully by 2026/2027 any new 737MAXs that come would have any new product adjustment.”
Ditching First Class
As part of the transformation, Oman Air has also ditched its First Class cabins in favour of a new ‘business plus’ product it is calling Business Studio, which retains the spacious First Class seats but pairs them with the standard business class food and service. What drove that?
“It’s a realization that we’re not a business carrier. We’re not bringing corporate traffic. Yes, there’s some corporate Oman traffic, a little bit in terms of the international business who invest in Oman But we’re not a big global financial centre. We don’t have that going for us.
“The first class product really is for the corporate market or the super elite, and it was just too small for us. At the same time, we were spilling in business. So we thought, well, this is a lot of real estate to dedicate towards a first plus product is little demand for, and we’re spilling out of business. So we’ve repurposed it.
“It’s also actually helped us get more access to the corporate market, because corporates are less and less willing to let even their senior executives book first class. So the minute we call it business class, we’ve seen an immediate quadrupling of business in that cabin.”
oneworld is still on the cards
One thing that isn’t changing is Oman Air’s accession to oneworld membership.
“The oneworld decision came a little bit before the transformation program. It’s been delayed because the transition program has come along and the bandwidth of the organization to do what it does well, day to day, and at the same time go through a very invasive transformation program, both commercially and operationally and from a cost point of view, it’s a huge job to get into an alliance. If you can imagine, we’ve got to have technology links with all those partners, frequent flyer arrangements, codeshare abilities, etc, etc. So it’s being pushed back.
“There’ll be an announcement soon about an exact joining joining date. But the intent is definitely we are going to join, so we haven’t stepped away from that. Is it the right decision? If you’re asking that, since I inherited the decision, it is. We’ve revalidated that we’re doing the right thing.”
Thank you to Con and his team for their time. You can read our previous coverage of Oman and Oman Air here:
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