Bumpy start for new Tunisian airline

When you’ve spent 10 months getting an airline off the ground, announcing a suspension of services on the day of its official launch seems an odd course of action.

Mohammed Frikha did precisely that on April 29 when his brainchild Syphax Airlines met opposition from Tunisair ground handling staff at Tunis’s Carthage Airport, who refused to check in Syphax passengers.

According to Tunisian media reports, Tunisair had welcomed Syphax’s market entry but problems had arisen when the new airline had expanded its operations to Tunis at short notice.

“We encountered some resistance from local unions, who were scared for the effect of our new services on Tunisair,” said Syphax commercial director Paul Sies.

A week before Frikha’s dramatic announcement, Tunisia’s transport ministry had agreed that Syphax could operate from all Tunisian airports and called on both airlines to work together at Tunis airport ‘to avoid competition that could undermine the national fleet’.

“We had to re-think our network quite rapidly and make changes to the existing schedule, which destabilised our position in the market for a few weeks,” admitted Sies. “The good news is that, just in front of the high [summer] season, load factors are really starting to pick up.”

It was a tough introduction to life for Tunisia’s first privately-owned scheduled airline. Frikha, one of Tunisia’s most prominent businessmen and CEO of on-board systems manufacturer Telnet, embarked on the project in an attempt to bring more air services to his home city of Sfax, midway down the North African nation’s Mediterranean coastline. Residents of the city and surrounding area had long felt that their region was neglected by the Tunisian authorities and lacked sufficient connections to the outside world.

Matters came to a head in 2011 when Frikha was visited in Telnet’s offices, which overlook Tunis Airport, by a group of businessmen, including a former government minister and banker, Monsour Moalla, who, like Frikha, has his origins in Sfax.

According to Syphax’s marketing manager, Mohamed Elfekih, the group’s conversation gradually moved to the topic of air services and ended with Frikha declaring: “I think we’re going to start an airline.”

“It was the first big [business] project launched after the Tunisian revolution,” said Elfekih.  As such, it became emblematic of the democratic uprising.

In June 2011 consultants were commissioned to undertake studies on passenger traffic that confirmed there was a ready market in Sfax. Based on this, Frikha approached the country’s civil aviation authorities for approval to create a new airline.

More studies were conducted at the nation’s airports to gauge the potential for a new airline, while 5000 travellers at Tunis Airport were interviewed to discover their journeys’ starting points and destinations.

These interviews revealed that around 35% of passengers transiting Tunis came from Sfax and the surrounding region.

This all took time. By the time Sies and other senior management personnel joined Frikha’s planned airline it was late autumn 2011. Sies, with 30 years in the airline industry under his belt, was shocked to hear Frikha declare that he wanted to launch services in March 2012.

“I still have nightmares about setting up the airline,” admitted Sies. “I said it was impossible. Normally you need 12-15 months to do a good set-up, from business plan to flying. Mohammed said, ‘The aircraft are arriving in March and I want to be in time to capture the high season’.”

The senior managers put their heads together, said Sies, to identify the biggest obstacles to achieving this timetable. Getting the necessary licences from Tunisia’s aviation authorities would be a fundamental step in getting Syphax up and running.

“We put our heads together and said, ‘OK, if we can get over these hurdles, we can do it’.” Solutions or work-arounds were sought. Getting an Air Operators Certificate was one of the first priorities, in order to move forward with IATA.

“We were fortunate to work hand-in-hand with the authorities here to get that lined up very early in the process.”

Preparations went surprisingly well and in March two leased Airbus A319s, formerly operated by Air Berlin but released by the German company as part of its recent extensive reorganisation, were delivered to Syphax. The aircraft are only two years old.

Trial services began in mid-April, only slightly behind Frikha’s initial timetable, but the clash with Tunisair ground staff at the capital’s airport two weeks later seemed to put the entire project in jeopardy.

Sies said that the CEO’s threat to close the fledgling airline was borne out of his passion for the project and concerns that his dream would be wrecked. The fact that some of his countrymen were working against him was “very difficult to understand and handle”. He said, ‘OK, if they don’t want to work for the future of the country, then I have no choice but to close down the airline’.

“The matter is now resolved, insofar as we have virtual freedom to fly out of Sfax, Djerba and Monastir, but don’t have full freedom to do what we want out of Tunis. We redesigned the network around the limitations we have there.”

Ironically, this limitation may have worked in Syphax’s favour: “We’ve seen that the regional flights are really popular. Perhaps the need to fly out of Tunis is much less than we thought.”

Any closure would have particularly disappointed the younger generation of Tunisians, added Sies, because “Syphax is seen as part of the liberation”. Its emphasis on selling seats online, as well as by more traditional distribution channels, is also popular with the younger generation.

Frikha chose a hybrid business model for his airline, with low costs but high standards of service. “We basically run the airline at operational level as a low-cost carrier (LCC), with high aircraft productivity, and we outsource as much as we can to the best providers [of services] at the best cost. Staff-wise, the airline is very lean.”

However, very little of this low-cost approach should be visible to the passengers, said Sies, with Syphax offering a full service on board. He likened the operational model to that of US carrier Jet Blue.

The airline operates a point-to point route network from Sfax, Djerba and Tunis to several French destinations – Paris Charles de Gaulle, Nice and Marseille – as well as Istanbul in Turkey and over the Libyan border to Tripoli.

Historic links with France mean that the north-south flow of Tunisians living in the European nation is important for Syphax. This is especially so especially during the summer holiday period and before Ramadan, when many emigrants travel home to see their families.

During those periods, flights from France are “absolutely packed. Traffic leaving Tunisia for Europe is more of a challenge.” At Eid, the flow is reversed.

To keep the company’s aircraft busy, Syphax undertakes flights for tour operators in and out of the popular holiday resort of Monastir.

Future plans call for the fleet to expand to five aircraft in five years, although this is open to change. “The A319 for us at the moment is ideal aircraft because we can operate it out of smaller airports. But we have to choose in the next few months on our future direction.” This could be in the form of larger A320s or A321s.

Whatever Syphax’s future course, Mohammed Frikha and his team will doubtless be hoping to encounter less turbulence than in the young airline’s first weeks of life.