Christine Ourmières-Widener, who joined the company in January, spoke to the JEP when she visited the Island to meet representatives from Ports of Jersey, Visit Jersey and government officials.
When asked if the airline’s unflattering nickname ‘Flymaybe’ was justified, Mrs Ourmières-Widener said: ‘We should deliver a product where the flight is on time, you have your bag and a smile from the cabin crew who gave you very good service on-board.
‘Do we do that 100 per cent of the time? No. Will we one day do it 100 per cent of the time? No. The question is how do you manage disruption better? How do we make sure that when there is a difficulty we are able to change it into an opportunity to show how we care about our customers?’
A recent BBC investigation found that the best-performing UK airline in terms of punctuality was Flybe, which had average delays of 15 minutes. In comparison, passengers travelling on easyJet flights faced an average delay of 24 minutes.
The BBC also found that passengers travelling to Düsseldorf from the Island – a route currently only operated by Flybe – were likely to experience delays of about six hours.
However, Ms Ourmières-Widener, the former vice-president of Air France-KLM USA, defended Flybe, and said that the airline’s reliability and on-time performance had improved.
She said: ‘We are investing in giving more information to our cabin crew, a better connection with the ground crew and better tools for our command centre. We are also investing in local resources for our service team.
‘We have just published our quarter results and you can see our operational performance and we have been improving on our reliability and on-time performance.
‘There will always be delayed and cancelled flights in our industry. We put all mitigation in place but the question is when it is happening what do you do to make sure the customer sees that you are trying to do everything you can?’
