By IPS Correspondents
HARARE, Jan 20 1997 (IPS)

Changes are underway to make Zimbabwe’s national airline — increasingly slammed for unreliability and mismanagement — live up to its mottos of commitment to excellent, customer care.

“A whole range of things aimed at giving better customer care,” are in the pipeline, explains Air Zimbabwe’s public relations manager, David Mwenga.

“We have met with travel agents to show them where we are going and we are also looking at cutting down fares,” says Mwenga. “We will enhance the training of staff in customer care handling.”

The airline is making a special effort to capture the lucrative market of business travellers.

“We will also be running promotions for full-fare flyers whereby we will provide businesspersons with accommodation or cars for them to use for the few days they will be, say, in Johannesburg,” Mwenga says.

At the same time, Air Zimbabwe is negotiating with an undisclosed airline in the region to lease a BAE-146 aircraft by the beginning of March, to replace two of its unpopular Fokker planes.

Airline officials say that the airline is not among the state- run companies to be privatised in keeping with ongoing economic reforms, but reliable sources say the government is seeking ways to commercialise the corporation.

These changes are a bid to revamp the image of the national carrier, which has been tarnished mainly by the airline’s poor record on punctuality and service.

Local, independent publications increasingly attribute the frequent delays and cancellations of flights to charters of the airline’s planes by President Robert Mugabe for his numerous trips abroad.

Just last month, ‘The Independent’ weekly reports, Mugabe took a “plane on a three-day state visit to Cyprus, leaving Kenya- bound passengers stranded, and costing the airline about 100,000 U.S. dollars in lost revenues”.

Officials in the tourism sector, which earns the country more than 100 million U.S. dollars annually, complain that Air Zimbabwe’s unreliability is frustrating their bid to market the country as the ideal place for a holiday.

Air Zimbabwe’s campaign to change its image comes at a time when the general public has written-off the airline as another one of Africa’s hopeless cases.

For example, outspoken economic commentator Eric Bloch has suggested that if the airline wants to become “punctual”, “for all flights, in both the departure and arrival columns, it should print ‘today’ instead of a specific time. By doing so, Air Zimbabwe has a prospect of achieving at least an 80 percent punctuality rating.”

Disgruntled clients have come up with a number of popular jibes, such as “a tradition of scaring” and “above all we scare” and “a commitment to His Excellency (Mugabe)”, which are respectively, sarcastic renditions of the Air Zimbabwe slogans, “A Tradition of Caring”, “Above all We Care” and “A Commitment to Excellence”.

But Mwenga says the national carrier has started to pull up its socks. “During the past two weeks we have only had two delays, one to Bulawayo (Zimbabwe’s second largest city) and one to London. We are back to normal as all our aircrafts are back in operation.”

Critics have charged that the shortage of aircraft had been caused in part by Mugabe’s frequent chartering of planes to haul huge delegations on his journeys.

But Air Zimbabwe’s chairman, David Zamchiya, insists that the shortage had nothing, “absolutely nothing, to do with the occasional charter of Air Zimbabwe by the state.”

“This (plane charters by the government) is a business we very much welcome in the same manner we would encourage all our private and public institutions to charter our aircraft for special services,” said Zamchiya.

He charged that the shortage of aircraft had been caused “purely by the illegal industrial action by one section of the airline and management’s inability to respond to this problem.”

Last October, nearly all of Air Zimbabwe’s fleet was grounded when engineers staged a two-week go-slow, demanding higher salaries, and over the past six months, the airline has lost four senior pilots, three of them Boeing 767 captains.

Rather than dispelling concern about mismanagment of the corporation, Zamchiya’s remarks drew attention to another of its major problems, the high turn over of senior managerial personnel, often attributed to far-reaching corruption and alleged political meddling.

For instance, in a press release on Dec. 7 1996, Zamchiya announced the axing of Managing Director, Huttush Muringi, the latest of several managing directors fired by the airline.

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