AirAsia to become the largest A320 airline operator in the world

The largest and leading low-cost carrier in Southeast Asia, AirAsia has placed the largest order of a total of 225 A320s, making it the biggest operator for the aircraft in the world. The latest contract for an additional 25 A320s together with a further 25 A320s on option, brings AirAsia Group's (Malaysia AirAsia, Thai AirAsia and Indonesia AirAsia) total orders to 175 firm orders and 50 purchase options.

The contract was signed today at the Langkawi Airshow by Dato’ Tony Fernandes, Group Chief Executive Officer of AirAsia Berhad and John Leahy, Chief Operating Officer - Customers of Airbus. The momentous ceremony was witnessed by YAB Dato’ Sri Najib bin Tun Hj. Abdul Razak, Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia.

AirAsia placed its original order for 60 A320s in March 2005, with re-orders for an additional 40 aircraft announced at the Farnborough Airshow in July 2006 and another 50 aircraft in January 2007. The first aircraft was delivered to AirAsia in December 2005 and currently AirAsia is operating with 31 A320s on a rapidly expanding domestic and regional network.

It is noteworthy to highlight that AirAsia’s Kuala Lumpur hub is one hundred percent operating with A320s and a combined fleet size of 64 aircraft. The new set of order is expected to completely replace Thai AirAsia’s and Indonesia AirAsia’s current fleet of Boeing 737 by 2008. Thai AirAsia has recently added two brand new A320s, the first one received on 21st October 2007 and the second on 10th November 2007.

“This purchase is an important step for us at AirAsia as it signifies our future aggressive route expansion plans in tandem to our expected traffic growth over the next decade. As the winner of CAPA Airline of the Year 2007, we are proud of this purchase as it further demonstrates our commitment to enhance AirAsia’s position on our networks by incorporating the most modern and efficient aircraft in the market. The addition of the aircrafts will be used to add frequency across the route network, introduce new routes and gradually replace the current fleet of Boeing 737 in Thailand and Indonesia. Reputed for its high reliability and low operating costs, the inception of A320s has indeed enhanced our efficiency level to greater heights. This is evident as on time performance has improved tremendously to an average of 85% from the Kuala Lumpur hub this year. AirAsia’s introduction to the aviation industry as an innovator has grown to the extent it is now a leader that sets the benchmark to others” said Dato’ Tony Fernandes, Group CEO of AirAsia Bhd.

"We have been extremely proud to be part of AirAsia’s outstanding success and delighted that the confidence in the A320 has resulted in the airline now becoming the largest airline customer for this aircraft in the world. With its unbeatable economics and enormous passenger appeal, I am confident that the large A320 fleet is destined to propel AirAsia to the forefront of industry in the years ahead,” said John Leahy, Airbus Chief Operating Officer - Customers.
The A320 Family, which includes the A318, A319, A320 and A321, is recognised as the benchmark single-aisle aircraft family. Each aircraft features fly by wire controls and all share unique cockpit commonality across the range. Over 5,500 Airbus A320 Family have been sold and over 3200 delivered to more than 200 customers and operators worldwide, making it the world’s best selling commercial jetliner ever.
With proven reliability and extended servicing periods, the A320 Family offers the lowest operating costs of any single aisle aircraft. In addition, the latest new cabin design saves on weight and offers the passenger a quieter and roomier experience as well as significantly larger overhead stowage lockers.
Uniquely, the A320 Family offers a containerised cargo system, which is compatible with the worldwide standard wide-body system.
Airbus is an EADS company.

Source: http://www.air-cosmos.com

Technorati Tags: Air Asia,Flight Bussiness,Air Cosmo

Competitive Analysis SEO

One of the most telling things you can do in any business is study your competitors. Your competition can reveal weakness in your business and open your eyes to new opportunities in your industry. The same is true in the web world, and with search engine optimization in particular. Why does your competitor consistently rank higher than you for important terms? What programming, content, and link building strategies are they using to help attain those rankings? Answer those questions and you'll be one step closer to out-ranking them and bringing that traffic and those sales to your site.

Who should you study?

A lot of industries will have hundreds of direct competitors, and many more indirect competitors. You can very easily get caught up in "paralysis by analysis" if you try to analyze every possible competitor that you have. The purpose of studying your competition is to better your business, so I prefer to limit my analysis to ten sites or less.
You probably already know a handful of your adversaries. Either they were the incumbent leaders in your industry when you began, or your customers constantly remind you that they have lower prices, or every time you Google a phrase in your industry they come up first in the search results. Those sites are the first ones you should add to your list to research. Fill the rest of the list in by picking sites that consistently rank high for the most searched phrases related to your business. If you haven't already done keyword research, I recommend starting with the SEO Book Keyword Research Tool. Once you understand which terms are searched the most, it will be pretty obvious which sites consistently rank high.

What information should you collect?

There are a plethora of potential metrics that can be used to gauge the competition. The six below can be collected for free in a matter of minutes and do a great job of explaining why a site ranks as well as it does.

Site Age -- the age of a site is generally considered to be one of the top five most influential factors in how high a site ranks. While it's something that is out of your control, sometimes you'll see a site from 1999 consistently outranking a better site from 2006 and it's helpful to understand why. You can see the history of a site using a nifty tool called the Wayback Machine.

Y! Links -- the number of backlinks the domain has in Yahoo. As you probably already know by now, the quantity and quality of links pointing to a site is extremely relevant in determining how high it ranks. Looking at the particular links that your competition has serves as one of the best ways to learn how they market their site. It is also one of the best ways to brainstorm potential link building ideas for your site. For example, if your competitors products are all reviewed on a popular blog in your industry, there's a good chance that same blog would want to review your products as well (giving you free publicity and quality links).

Pages indexed -- this refers to the number of pages listed in a search engines index (also referred to as cached pages). Sites that rank high are generally easy for Google, Yahoo, and MSN to spider and thus have nearly all of their pages included in their indexes. You can check how many pages are indexed by typing in site: www.yoursite.com, or by using a tool like the Indexed Pages tool on SEOmoz. Using sitemaps is a great way to ensure that every page on your site is indexed properly.

Last indexed -- this is the date of the last time Google visited the home page of the site. Ideally your site is indexed every single day, but it usually depends on how frequently you update your content. If you update content regularly, you should be being indexed at least once per week. You can find this date by clicking the "Cached" link next to any Google search result.

Home Page PR -- this refers to Google Page Rank, a 0-10 score that Google gives to assess the value of a web page. It's primarily determined by the quality and quantity of incoming links, and is a quick and dirty way to see how popular a page is. Since it's a universal metric that all webmasters can quickly check, it's often misused to assume how much traffic a site gets or how high it ranks -- neither of which correlate very well with PR. For our purposes though, it's a nice barometer to look at. It can be checked using the Google Toolbar or a site like PRChecker.

Strongest Pages -- SEOmoz has a great strongest pages tool that will list off the most important pages on a domain, based on number of links pointing to it and its current rankings. This gives you an idea of what content on their domain is causing the high rankings. Is it popular articles? Is it product pages? Whatever their strongest pages, you should take note and use those pages as guidelines for potential additions and modifications to your site.

Using the information to your advantage

Pretty quickly you'll start to realize that all of the sites you're analyzing have been around for a few years, are indexed frequently and thoroughly, and have a lot of quality backlinks. So how do you get there? Well there's nothing you can do about site age, but the rest are very much in your control: you can model title tags and page headings after the competition, you can structure your site and internally link the way that they do, you can add sections related to topics that they rank high for, and you can most definitely expand your link building plan by studying what has worked for them. Ultimately, analyzing and understanding your competition will reduce your learning curve and accelerate the growth of your site.

Written by: Adam McFarland via Entire Web


Technorati Tags: SEO, PRChecker, Industries, Baclink, Tool, Rangking, Google, Yahoo, SEOmoz, Wayback, Bussiness