Introduction
Qatar Airways is one of the best airlines in the world. It was founded in late 1993 but started its operations at the beginning of 1994. Though the airline served a handful of routes over the years, its re-launch in 1997 marked the beginning of its current vision, which is to lead with excellence and the highest standards of service both locally and internationally (Wang, 2021). Apart from having one of the broadest route networks internationally, Qatar Airways’ revenue has experienced a significant increase over the years.
Despite the year 2020 being one of the most challenging years for businesses and people all over the world, Qatar Airways was able to rebuild its network from 33 destinations to over 110 destinations in that same year. However, just like any other business entity, the airline faces both operation and change management challenges. This report aims to identify those challenges, their root causes, and possible solutions.
Operation Challenges, Causes, and Possible Solutions
Delays Due to Natural Disasters
Qatar Airways is confronted with various obstacles in its day-to-day operations and maintenance, which are of crucial importance. These hurdles consist of natural disasters, failures in information technology, non-compliance with government regulations, unpredictable fluctuations in fuel prices, employee strikes, intense competition from other airlines, and litigation. Natural disasters like earthquakes, thunderstorms, snowstorms, and floods present a crucial problem not only for Qatar Airways but also for other airlines. These disasters are mostly caused by climatic and weather events that are beyond human control. As a result, the simplest way an airline may deal with such disasters is to re-schedule or cancel flights for safety purposes (Dube and Nhamo, 2019). This proves to be an unpopular choice as it affects the airline by adding to the cost of travel delays.
Handling Delays
There are different ways that Qatar Airways can handle such delays. The first way is through effective communication with the customers. Some customers have a preferred arrival time due to business meetings and appointments, which they can miss due to flight delays (Dube and Nhamo, 2019). The airline, therefore, needs to have representatives capable of handling delayed customers with understanding and respect to ensure that they remain content and loyal to the airline.
Weather intelligence is another effective way of dealing with delays caused by natural disasters. Unlike generic weather forecasts that most airlines use, Qatar Airways could invest in weather intelligence software provided by trusted weather companies like Tommorow.io (Verma, 2023). The company can build a weather insight dashboard that is specific to the airline’s operation routes. This way, Qatar Airways will know precisely what weather is coming up and its impacts and help the airline plan its operations.
Information Technology Failures
Information technology failures are another operational challenge facing the airline. For Qatar Airways to remain relevant in the future, it must evolve into an e-commerce entity, with the Internet playing a pivotal role in the airline’s technological progress. The company’s information sharing and communication processes are certainly the main issue, and the mobile sales force is particularly affected. Qatar Airways currently employs an Ethernet LAN system and broadband connectivity across all of its domestic offices. Its business operations have also significantly increased due to its quick expansion over the years.
With this information in mind, it is significant to note that the airline currently employs a large portion of outdated technology, thereby making access and communications challenging. As a result, projects and systems to replace these outdated databases are required to make sure that the IT system is also designed to match the business’ expansion.
Compliance Issues
Failure to comply with government regulations is an endemic problem that affects most airlines worldwide, including Qatar Airways. Since the airline facilitates diverse routes across the globe, its aircraft often travel between territories with different environmental standards and policies. Moreover, these policies keep changing to regulate greenhouse gas emissions that could pose a danger to public health.
To deal with this issue, the company can consider investing in next-generation bio-fuels, engines that are cleaner and highly efficient, and purchasing modern aircraft that are fuel-efficient when substituting old ones. Similarly, they need to constantly review the required standards of operating at different airports. By taking this move, they will be able to modify their operations to conform to those standards and stay clear of flying limitations and environmental landing fees.
Fuel Costs
Fuel is one of the largest operating costs in the aviation industry. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is responsible for controlling over 40% of the global fuel supplies. This means it can either increase or decrease oil production levels to meet global requirements. As a result, the law of supply and demand is applied here, whereby prices go up if the demand transcends supply or prices go down when supply exceeds demand. Though fuel prices have been fluctuating over the years, airlines have experienced great strain due to rapid hikes in their prices since 2022. The costs today are 50% higher than they were at the beginning of 2010.
However, there are some fuel-saving strategies that Qatar Airlines can utilize to reduce yearly fuel costs. These include changing operational practices such as flying on more efficient trajectories. With the right information at hand, flight crews can solicit for landing and take-off routes that conserve fuel and can also benefit from using shortcuts when flying most direct routes.
Staff Strikes
Staff strikes in the aviation industry are not a new thing but significantly impact an airline’s overall operations and profitability. A majority of its workforce consists of both Western and Asian employees who perform roles ranging from engineering, customer service, aircrew, maintenance, and ground operations. Employees working for the company strike for various reasons, thus disrupting its normal operations. They complain of excessive working hours, staff shortages, restrictions on mobility, delayed salaries, maltreatment, and racial discrimination.
To minimize such strikes, the airline management should make efforts to take better care of their employees by listening to their concerns and making changes where possible. For instance, they can put up laws against maltreatment and other forms of discrimination and also ensure that those laws are strictly followed by everyone. Scheduling face-to-face meetings with members of every department will assist in effective communication of employee issues and effective ways of dealing with them. As much as profits need to be made, making its workers carry out their responsibilities without enough rest can endanger their health and risk the safety of their customers.
Fierce Competition
The aviation industry is currently expanding fast, and it will continue to expand in the subsequent decades. As much as this expansion is good, it brings about competition between airlines. Jet Star and Tiger are low-cost airlines that pose a significant competitive threat to Qatar Airways. Etihad and Emirates also pose stiff competition as they have formed partnerships with different low-cost airlines in contrast with Qatar (Mimovic et al., 2018).
Though the company is not interested in becoming a low-cost carrier, embracing the idea may be a good way of keeping up with its competitors. With the current economic uncertainty in the world, consumers are more interested in affordable and low-cost tickets as much as they need safety and comfort. Therefore, Qatar needs to be more flexible in its current prices and introduce low fare rates to fit the needs of its customers. The company’s management should also consider looking into untapped markets in regions like South America, Asia, and Africa.
Lawsuits From Frustrated Customers
Facing lawsuits can be the worst thing that an airline would want to encounter, especially if it is widely known as one of the best carriers in customer service. Unfortunately, five Australian women filed a lawsuit against the airline and the Qatari government for unlawful and invasive gynecological exams. According to (Zhuang, 2022), the women had booked a flight with the airline heading to Sydney before they were suddenly pulled off the aircraft at gunpoint and subjected to medical procedures without their consent. That deed was meant to help investigate how a newborn had been deserted in the airport’s bathroom. The case eventually turned out that those women were not innocent, but they suffered mental trauma as a result.
This lawsuit damaged the airline’s reputation, and handling the problem at hand differently would have saved it from experiencing such chaos. Most Australian women were so outraged about that situation and even commented that they would never consider traveling with Qatar Airways in the future. To prevent such lawsuits from happening again, the airline’s security protocols need to be thoroughly reviewed to help identify and address them.
Change Management Challenges, Causes, and Possible Solutions
Changes are good and necessary for any business that yearns for success. However, they do not happen overnight and always come with a cost. They lead to additional risks that require control and mitigation. Most change management challenges in airlines are a result of overall operations, demands, needs, processes, and services. The era in which one significant shift occurred in the aviation sector every five years has long since passed. Businesses are being compelled to adapt rapidly and dynamically to shifting marketing conditions due to intense competition and globalization (Araz et al., 2020). To have a competitive edge, it is, therefore, necessary for Qatar Airways to understand and embrace change management, innovation, and capacity planning.
Fleet Management
When making any changes, the company needs to take certain things into consideration. They include the reasons and goals for that particular change, existing and new hazards, relevant safety compliance requirements and risk control, and affected parties. One major change that the company needs to make involves aircraft. It is good enough that the airline already flies to more than 150 destinations internationally and has a majority of the modern fleet. However, they need to make efforts toward purchasing more modern types of planes and revamping the old fleet due to their plan of introducing more flight destinations.
The airline is currently having issues with stagnating profits. With this in mind, there is a need for a better market and gap analysis in the company. This initiative will give its management the knowledge they need to position their services and products in a way that will appeal to their target clients better. Customer expectations usually affect their willingness to purchase products and services being offered by different airlines (Arazet al., 2020). Therefore, taking into consideration consumer demands, needs, and preferences will greatly assist in making a better and more informed decision regarding the same. The figure below shows a gap model of service quality that the company can use to comprehend customer satisfaction and make possible changes to its current service delivery to attract and maintain loyal customers.
Digital Transformation
New trends play a big role in the revolution of businesses all over the world. When it comes to digital transformation, the aviation sector has been leading the way in lowering operational costs, enhancing the passenger experience, and optimizing general effectiveness. However, the introduction of new technology into Qatar Airlines’ processes and operations presents another change management challenge that the company needs to deal with (Wang, 2021).
For the future, as well as the current moment of rebuilding amid the pandemic, the company must re-evaluate how it employs technology to spur innovation. For instance, they could look out for small devices generating significant changes in their systems. A good example of such devices is an airline app that enables passengers to take other flights if they notice that one is overbooked or one that enables them to queue virtually while waiting for their flights.
Effective Team Management
In any company, different departments are expected to work in harmony for the success of the business. Qatar is not any different, as it consists of different teams that make up its structure. They include sales and marketing, reservation and ticketing, maintenance, line personnel, operations, and staff personnel. Effective management of these teams improves performance and collaboration in a great way (Wang, 2021). However, the airline is currently experiencing challenges in managing multiple teams. Poor management issues in these areas have severely weighed on employee work-life balance. If immediate action is not taken, the company might develop even further problems to do with employee burnout, poor teamwork, difficult employees, and decreased performance.
The company should focus more on being a ‘people organization’ whereby its employees are the priority before everything else. To help employees improve their work-life balance, the company needs to offer working conditions that are more flexible and empower people to manage their time well. Their workloads can also be reviewed regularly to ensure that they are allocated what they can achieve rather than being overworked.
Leadership Style
The CEO of the airline, AI Baker’s leadership style, is more of a fierce form of transactional leadership. This is a system that follows a fixed, pre-conceived process whereby employees are rewarded if they achieve what is expected of them and receive punishment for not attaining their goals (Wang, 2021). Though this system is easy and fair and ties employees to specific goals that promote business growth, it has quite several disadvantages.
For instance, it fails to build relationships with employees and discourages creativity in the business. When changes are made in the company, employees have limited to no contribution in making recommendations and prosing ideas that could otherwise be of great help to the business as a whole. Talented employees who value the art of innovation cannot thrive in such a system because, for them, satisfaction and engagement are key. Since employees are also the facilitators of change, involving them in advance before new processes are implemented in the business is crucial. For this reason, adopting a transformational leadership style can be a game-changer for the airline.
Change Fatigue
Change fatigue is another example of a change management challenge faced by the company. It involves carrying out multiple projects all at once during the implementation stage such that employees are overwhelmed and fatigued. With the ongoing pandemic that has impacted every aspect of people’s lives, most people can only deal with a certain number of changes effectively. Employees are different, and while some have a high capacity for change, others possess a low capacity to absorb them (Araz et al., 2020). Reducing the likelihood of change fatigue could involve implementing changes that are based on the experiences of the employees during critical periods. Additionally, planning, delegating, and prioritizing projects according to their importance and urgency in the daily operations of the organization is a good strategy when handling many projects. A slower and phased change implementation tactic is better than a large and simultaneous approach.
The goal of both operational and change management principles is to ensure that any changes that influence corporate operations are implemented efficiently from beginning to end. These principles aim to resolve any kinds of inadequacies and weaknesses that are a hindrance to an organization’s stability and ability to optimize growth. Every organization has its share of challenges in business operations, but how to handle them is what makes a difference. As employees are the most important assets in an organization, managers should continuously assess and review their feedback regarding all operations and processes (Araz et al., 2020). There should always be room for adaptability rather than focusing on the implementation of fixed transformations. Additionally, there is a sense of uncertainty about the future, and the earlier businesses adapt to changes, the better their chances of remaining relevant and succeeding in the competitive business world.
Conclusion
In conclusion, every business has its share of challenges that affect its daily operations. This report reveals both operational and change management challenges facing Qatar Airways, the root causes, and the solutions. The operational challenges that Qatar Airways must contend with include staff strikes, information technology failures, natural disasters, non-compliance with government regulations, volatile fuel prices, legal disputes, and intense competition from other airlines. Change management challenges affecting the company are also well presented. They include the purchase of modern aircraft, a better market and gap analysis, adopting new technology trends, managing multiple teams, change of leadership style, and change fatigue.
All these obstacles are capable of limiting the firm’s ability to grow and gain a competitive advantage in the aviation industry (Mimovic et al., 2018). However, having the correct attitude and defining such issues appropriately is the first step to making them easier to solve, thus saving resources, time, and money. As the airline is already on its way to the top of the industry, overcoming these challenges will help it remain relevant for a long time and promote its sustainability.
Reference List
Araz, O.M. et al. (2020) ‘Data analytics for operational risk management’, Decision Sciences, 51(6), pp. 1316-1319.
Dube, K. and Nhamo, G. (2019) ‘Climate change and the aviation sector: A focus on the Victoria Falls tourism route’, Environmental Development, 29, pp. 5-15.
Gap model of service quality (5 GAP model) (2021) Lapaas. Web.
Mimovic, P., Budimčević, K., and Marcikic, A. (2018) ‘Measuring the performance of Middle East Airlines – AHP approach’, International Journal of the Analytic Hierarchy Process, 10(3). Web.
Verma, P. (2023) The Hunt for a Better Weather Forecast [Preprint]. Web.
Wang, Z. (2021) Understanding the strategy used by leading airlines: a case study of Qatar Airways. Master Thesis. LAB University of Applied Sciences.
Zhuang, Y. (2022) ‘5 Australian Women Sue Qatar Over Invasive Searches at Airport,’ The New York Times [Preprint]. The New York Times Company. Web.