Soaring to greater heights

REVOLUTIONISING and reforming its brand constantly to improve and offer its customers ease when using their service, AirAsia launched its first “Airvolution 2017: Spearheading Innovation in Asean” challenge last weekend.
The undertaking came in the form of a “hackathon” made to generate ideas to explore new ways in which air travel and AirAsia in particular, can benefit from. The challenge pooled participating teams from 13 nations, attracting the “right people” to RedQ to come up with the best answers and solutions to travel-related propositions.
Participants had less than 24 hours to come up with knock-out solutions. After a tough time assessing the submissions, which considered impact, creativity and execution, as well as how the team addressed the challenge, the judges announced the overall winning team as Aviato, one of two teams fromSingapore. The winners walked away with RM25,000 in cash, 100,000 AirAsia BIG Points and a return ticket for each of its five team members to any AirAsia destination of their choice.
Said Tan Sri Tony Fernandes at the launch of Airvolution 2017: “Of course there is a possibility of buying an idea generated from this challenge, provided its is viable and beneficial to AirAsia and its customers.
“I introduced this hackathon because I felt we cannot do it all by ourselves in-house. So we thought, why not tap into these young creative minds to spur ideas and solutions,” Fernandes added.
Far from just another “tech challenge”, the competition provides support to the tech community by establishing a platform where new ideas can be explored. It also allows techies to express their dreams with AirAsia guiding and supporting.
“Airvolution marks the start of our engagement with the tech community, which we see as a continuous, two-way conversation, where AirAsia has the opportunity to learn from the best and, in return, offer support to great ideas we feel the world should know about.
“From my knowledge, AirAsia is about 20% to 30% digital – but I hope by 2018, we can reach 70% to 80%. To be really digital from my point of view, I think all our services should be coming out from this smartphone. We are a long way away to becoming totally digital but that’s where we’re moving towards,” added Fernandes.
Teams and nations
Dapper labs – Australia
Nomads – Hong Kong
Codeminators – India
A-team – India
Unhandled Exceptions! – India
BinAIRy – India
neutron star collision – Indonesia
Airkathon –Malaysia
AirStrike –Malaysia
Revolegend –Malaysia
PENTASQUAD –Malaysia
i-SENI –Malaysia
Swoosh Swoosh – Philippines
Algorithm – Philippines
Aviato – Singapore
Raven – Singapore
AIRBORNE – South Korea
Helayo – Sri Lanka
Titans – Sri Lanka
Routster – Thailand