Ensuring Synergy in Operations

Why contract one single solutions provider to handle every aspect of your trip? According to Aristotle “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” and in the context of flight support, ensuring synergy is a massive contributor to smoother operations. 

The principle of synergy changed modern business practices. The principle states that the common interaction of system components leads to a result that is greater than the simple sum of the components themselves. However, when we mention synergy in general aviation, most of our colleagues think of an aircraft and not the concept of different segments of the industry coming together to produce a greater process and, ultimately, result.

The evolution of technology has changed the aviation community’s attitude when it comes to deciding how, when, and where to go to purchase the services they need to support an international flight. Technology increased the aviation community’s self-efficacy, which for general aviation international travel contains a great flaw: the ability to resolve service failures with effective service recovery. It’s inevitable that from time to time there will be service failures in international aviation (i.e. times when a customer’s expectations are not met). All involved expect the service provider to effectively solve the problem, and it is at times like this that we recognise the importance of the principle of synergy in aviation.

Aviation international services, visa facilitation, flight planning, permitting, ground handling, transportation, hotels arrangements, risk management, and fuel are intricately connected and co-dependent on each other. All of these services are vital parts of a successful trip. In the event of one service failing, it not only negatively impacts one part of the flight but can also affect every other aspect of the customer’s trip. When a customer contracts different service providers for all their required international needs and a service failure occurs, the likelihood of a service recovery to the customer’s satisfaction is highly improbable and rarely attempted.

Consolidation, combination, customization, and connections are the four principles of business synergy that the customer loses when multiple service providers are used for the same international trips. Often, more and more members of the aviation community use technology to choose multiple providers. This causes the client to lose the “power of synergy” and therefore the greatness of the whole. It basically minimises the ability of a service provider to recover from a failure and greatly reduces the service provider’s ability to exceed customer expectations. The bottom line is: by using a single service provider to oversee all aspects of a trip, the provider has more control over the outcome and ultimately, customer satisfaction.