CVFR Travel Group, Group CEO, Ram Chhabra at the CAPA Airline Leader Summit Australia Pacific 2026

Transcript

Ram Chhabra:Uncertain current marketplace in terms of fuel, war, political unrest. It's getting more and more complicated every year, and so the landscape is getting a little bit more complex, uncertain, but we see airlines are adapting. And I think we sort of see in the coming months airlines getting smarter, more adaptive, quick to react. Look at the current situation in the Middle East. You had airlines pulling out, Middle East carriers, they've restarted, they're back to full capacity again. So I think airline adaptation and change has been quite impressive over the last few months. Every market operates very, very differently. Australia is a very complicated market for a country with only a population of 26, 27 million people, we heard this morning there's 62 airlines flying to the country with 14 international airports. That's quite a large number of airlines and airports for a country with such a small population. So I think local knowledge, understanding how the market reacts to certain changes, and also the local political and economic situation is imperative to understand how you should price, how you should market yourself as a as an airline in the country. I think our biggest hurdle, which we have to explain to the airlines, is that we're not a cost, we're an asset. So it's trying to explain to the airlines that we bring in more efficiencies and probably provide a far better cost-effective solution than the airlines setting up their own operations. The cost of doing business in Australia is getting higher and higher and more complex, and we saw it this morning on the panel. Yeah. Earlier, the airport authorities were mentioning that. We can simplify that process for them and provide the local expertise which they may not have. CAPA for us is to showcase to the airlines that we invest back into the industry. For us, it's also trends, to understand what's happening in the marketplace. It's a big world, but very small, if that makes sense. So we want to know what's happening in all parts of the industry and all parts of the world. As you said, we've been part of CAPA for many years now. So every conference, be it Athens, be it Hong Kong, there's different audiences, different understanding. And so for us, we see a lot of value in CAPA. The knowledge you can obtain here, the understanding you can obtain here is second to none. In 3 days, in 2 days, it's more knowledge you can obtain than in a year, in my opinion. You're especially rich yourself, that the information you provide in terms of market trends, that's priceless.

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