Avianca, Chief Strategy & Planning Officer, Michael Swiatek, speaking to CAPA TV at the IATA AGM 2023

Transcript

Michael Swiatek:So we have 2 major objectives today. One is obviously to meet colleagues and talk to business partners, and the second is to spread this message of awareness of disability, persons with disability, which represents over 100 million travelers in the world today. The industry does a good job today, but of course we want to do a better job. We're mainly focused on high-impact, low-cost solutions, and we basically have 5 tools available to us, one which is awareness, training, process improvements, digital technology, and then hardware and technology. I believe we need to move on all 5. Awareness is the first one. As a person with a disability myself, I'm blind, the awareness of flight attendants, check-in counter staff at airlines across the world is quite low today. They don't know quite how to approach me and they don't know what questions to ask of a person who's traveling who is blind. Okay. Yeah, I'm happy to say at Avianca I'm also the co-chair of our diversity, equity, and inclusion work stream. Stream, the inclusion absolutely incorporates accessibility for our own employees in the workforce. I think it's made a difference in that with the supply shortages at airports, the workforces are even a little more constrained. Delays do not help, and, you know, we're working through that both for passengers who need accessibility and passengers in general. We're happy to report that for Avianca, demand in most of our regions has returned to 2019 levels. You know, so we have survived COVID. We went through a Chapter 11 reorganization in 18 months during COVID We pivoted on our business model to be more value-based. We're in the process of renewing our, our culture at Avianca. And our final and 5th chapter right now is an integration with a holding company, Abra, with GOL from Brazil and Avianca from our home geography, is really Guatemala to Ecuador. It's kept partnerships at the front of our agenda, which I would say was previous to COVID and post-COVID. You know, we represent about 1% of the airline industry. You know, we have about 30 airlines that fly in Colombia of the 304 IATA members, and clearly for geographies like Asia, Africa, Middle East, we rely on partners to help transfer passengers across the globe. The big learning for us is that culture is the most important thing. We have over 12,000 employees and we need all of our team to work together, to be all aboard, To deliver a product to our customers every day that's safe, reliable, clean, efficient, hassle-free, and friendly. Well, the biggest remaining challenge is clearly that this industry can throw an event at you at any given moment. Again, labour shortages around the world. Well, Willie Walsh today spoke at IATA. Sustainability is a huge issue. Taxation is a huge issue. Working with governments across our region. So those opportunities and problems have remained. We believe we're in a stronger position to help tackle them, but there's some daunting task ahead. You know, we need those incentives on sustainable aviation fuel that Willie spoke about today. You know, that is the real path forward. We also think from an Avianca perspective that, again, densifying our planes, And reducing the carbon per seat is also critical to this fight on becoming sustainable. Well, I think the mood's fantastic. I think it was mentioned this is perhaps the largest AGM ever, the 79th. You know, it's amazing the people I've not seen in the last 3 years who are here today. And, you know, building relationships is a big part of the service that airlines provide. And this is a living representation that's— that is still important and still something that people enjoy doing on a regular basis.

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