An­drea Perez-Sobers

Se­nior Re­porter

an­drea.perez-sobers

@guardian.co.tt

De­spite Caribbean Air­lines (CAL) re­port­ing loss­es and hav­ing sev­en chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cers in ten years, the work­ers and the brand were able to weath­er the storm and be re­silient.

CAL’s chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer Garvin Med­era com­ment­ed on the air­line while de­liv­er­ing the fea­ture ad­dress on the first day of the an­nu­al In­ter­na­tion­al Fi­nance and Ac­count­ing Con­fer­ence, host­ed by the In­sti­tute of Char­tered Ac­coun­tants of T&T (ICATT), at the Hy­att Re­gency yes­ter­day. The theme of the con­fer­ence, which ends to­day, is “Chart­ing a Re­silient Fu­ture”.

Med­era, who be­came CEO of the air­line in Oc­to­ber 2017, told the au­di­ence that when he start­ed there was no plan for the air­line’s fu­ture, and his first five years were spent build­ing out a strate­gic plan and turn­ing around the day-to-day busi­ness.

“These ef­forts were done with the en­tire team; we were all in this to­geth­er. What we did not get right, we failed to pre­dict that COVID-19 would shut down the trav­el in­dus­try. Over­all, our plan has been es­sen­tial, in so many ways, by keep­ing us on track and main­tain­ing con­sis­ten­cy and fo­cus even in the face of un­fore­see­able chal­lenges,” Med­era said.

He not­ed that the brand has de­vel­oped over the years and cus­tomers now have more con­fi­dence in the air­line.

“Talk­ing about cus­tomers, the over­all ex­pe­ri­ence was on my pri­or­i­ty to-do list. Our rep­u­ta­tion was mixed and to cre­ate re­silience, we need­ed con­sis­tent qual­i­ty, choice, and at­ten­tive­ness. We cre­at­ed our first cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence team, and we adopt­ed a net pro­mot­er score to bet­ter as­sess our progress,” CAL’s CEO out­lined.

Prof­itabil­i­ty

He said the air­line’s prof­itabil­i­ty is ex­pect­ed to re­turn in its 2023 fi­nan­cial year.

“In 2018 and 2019, we had an op­er­at­ing prof­it for the first time in sev­en years, and in 2020, as a re­sult of the pan­dem­ic, we made a US$109 mil­lion loss. When we an­nounce our re­sults in 2023, we ex­pect to show an op­er­at­ing prof­it again. The gov­ern­ment al­so backed us, and I think they made the right choice,” he men­tioned.

Touch­ing on the is­sue of risk for the busi­ness to grow, Med­era said that so many CEOs are brought in­to strug­gling busi­ness­es to cut costs, tight­en up and re­boot, but more need­ed to be done with the air­line.

He said two crit­i­cal ar­eas that need­ed to be ad­dressed were tech­nol­o­gy and growth, to be more re­silient.

“Economies have scaled, and we need­ed to cov­er our fixed costs and our net­work al­so need­ed to be big­ger to tru­ly sup­port the Caribbean re­gion. The air­line al­so de­cid­ed to di­ver­si­fy our rev­enue streams, such as Jet Pack, up­grad­ed car­go, and in-flight com­merce,” Med­era dis­closed.

He al­so told the au­di­ence that every busi­ness is dif­fer­ent, but as­sess­ing the en­vi­ron­ment, cul­ture, and task is need­ed be­fore one as­sem­bles its tool kit.

Giv­ing re­marks was ICATT’s pres­i­dent Dwayne Ro­driguez-Sei­jas, who said hav­ing ap­proved ICATT’s 2022-2025 Strate­gic plan, the In­sti­tute’s coun­cil and sec­re­tari­at have em­barked on a ro­bust jour­ney to ad­vance the pro­fes­sion and en­sure its greater rel­e­vance and im­pact across busi­ness, in­dus­try, and econ­o­my.

In giv­ing some in­sights as to what ICATT has achieved over the year, Ro­driguez-Sei­jas said it con­tributed to the strength­en­ing of pub­lic fi­nance man­age­ment to broad­en the ac­count­ing pro­fes­sion’s reach in the pub­lic sec­tor which is a sig­nif­i­cant op­por­tu­ni­ty to ad­vance the pro­fes­sion’s pub­lic in­ter­est man­date.