With Ravn Air beginning to take reservations for flights on Wednesday, the air group is reflecting upon the steps that have been taken to get the much-troubled air group back into the skies, starting Friday and continuing throughout the Winter.
Ravn CEO Rob McKinney spoke with KSRM News on Thursday and said that the limited six-city schedule of flights is only a preview of what’s to come for Ravn: “This is just a stopgap measure. We’re still waiting final approval from the U.S. Department of Transportation for our full schedule. This is just a tool that some companies use kind of in a different way, but it gets us back into the air and gets us back where we can sell individual seats that people can afford, instead of chartering the whole airplane.” He added: “It is pretty limited, with limited cities and we’re limited to four round-trips per-week, per-city. It’s not what we want, and ultimately, it’s not what we’re going to be able to offer. Not knowing when that final approval is going to come through, we’ve decided to do this as an interim measure.”
An area of importance to McKinney was to employ as many former Ravn employees as possible: “Getting the [former] staff back was actually the easiest part! We got some messages out on social media and threw up a new RavnAlaska.com website. That was really the most of it. We got pretty much everyone back. I think we might have hired three new people off-the-street out of 370 employees. So, pretty much, it’s everybody that worked here before is what is making the service go forward.” He continued: “There was all new training. We brought in specific trainers for customer service to make sure that everybody realizes that treating our customers as best as we possibly can is what’s going to make us a success and what’s going to bring people back over-and-over-and-over again.”
Despite employing many of the same people, McKinney is aware that the previous iteration of Ravn did not have a glowing reputation for customer service. He said that one of the primary areas of focus will be to earn the trust of Ravn’s patrons: “I knew early on that was going to be a challenge for us. I had several recommendations that it was so bad, that we should just change the name and start over. I wasn’t for that because I don’t think that really fools anyone. It was going to be very expensive to do that. We take customer service so seriously here, and like I alluded to earlier, we put the entire staff – pilots, flight attendants, mechanics, you name it – through customer service training because in some way, shape, or form, everybody serves the customer here. If we don’t serve the customer, we’ll go the way of old Ravn.”
Flights are currently operating in Anchorage, Kenai, Homer, Sand Point, Dutch Habor, and Valdez.
