AirAsia To Extend Snap To Other Asean Countries By August

By Zairina Zainudin KUALA LUMPUR, July 23 (Bernama) – Low-cost airline, AirAsia plans to extend its SNAP platform to the rest of ASEAN by August, following the encouraging take-up for the offering in Malaysia. SNAP is one of AirAsia’s latest initiatives to revitalise domestic travel, offering flight and hotel bundle with the best price guaranteed, whilst transforming airasia.com into Asia Pacific’s leading travel and lifestyle platform. AirAsia.com chief executive officer Karen Chan said being the world’s only Online Travel Agent (OTA) that owns an airline provided a huge advantage for AirAsia to offer the best price guaranteed in the market. She said the airline optimised its pricing based on the yield curve of every flight, route and sector, besides partnering directly with three to five star properties to provide flight and hotel combo at an unbeatable price. “Other OTA can’t be as cheap as ours. They can subsidise (the price), but they cannot do that for every flight and every day at RM1 like we at AirAsia do, because we have the dynamic pricing engine to control all that. “The secret weapon is our data; the load factor of a particular aircraft flying to respective destination, passengers’ preferences, and their history. So SNAP is so powerful,” she told Bernama. To-date, AirAsia has signed over 400 properties under various hotel chains and more than 100 independent hotels across Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia as the company continues its ASEAN expansion. Domestically, Chan said the most popular destinations currently include Langkawi, Kota Kinabalu and Penang as consumers are hungry for a holiday following months of lockdowns. She also said AirAsia is working closely with the Malaysian Association of Hotels in a bid to collaborate with more hotels, and hoped to increase its partnerships with independent hotels in Kuala Lumpur, Langkawi and Penang, as well as in Sabah and Sarawak. -- BERNAMA