Alan Sparling - Airline manager
I’VE HELD this position – country manager for Scandinavian Airlines Ireland – for six years and recently celebrated 21 years with SAS.
I started on the reservations and ticketing desk. One day my boss asked me to go out and visit a travel agent and I thought, “I like this”, so I moved into sales and marketing.
Like so many airport workers, I live on the northside. If you’re rich you live in Malahide; if not, like me, you live in Skerries. There are five pilots on my estate alone.
There’s a great sense of community when you work at the airport, even though you are all competing for business.
Two days every fortnight I work in the UK, and on those days I’m up at 4.30am. You get used to it.
If I’m at home, at least three days a week I’ll get up at 6.15am and go for a run. When you’ve three young kids you’re too tired to do it at the end of the day and I like to keep fit. You never feel like doing it, but you feel great once you do.
When I get to the office, I’ll go through the passenger list to see who is travelling. We have 24 flights a week and I’ll know a lot of the regulars, but there’ll be some new passengers I’ll want to go down and say hello to at check-in too.
There’s always an opportunity to talk about corporate agreements if someone is travelling regularly. Very many of our customers are from small and medium-sized firms, travelling to Scandinavia for business purposes.
During the day, my sales team does a lot of prospecting for business among travel agents and tour operators and I’ll oversee that. You have to fight a lot harder for business now.
I’ll also look at our advertising and keep an eye on what our competitors are doing.
SAS has been flying out of Dublin for 44 years, but we’re not as recognised as the two big players here, so we have to communicate our brand qualities, “service and simplicity”, through advertising and marketing.
There are five people in our Dublin team. Up until 2005 we had 16, but SAS foresaw what was coming and we went through a process called “core SAS”, focusing on our core business, which meant being leaner in readiness for the downturn.
Every day I look at our forward bookings, checking for trends. Passenger numbers have held up well for us. Apart from the volcano disruption, it has been a good year, mainly because so many Irish business people are out in Scandinavia doing a bit of prospecting themselves.
I don’t have lunch during the day. I have a bowl of porridge for breakfast and, apart from coffee and a chocolate bar, that pretty much does me until dinner. I’ll wait until our last flight goes out at 6.40pm and head home.
* Alan Sparling is country manager for Scandinavian Airlines Ireland
* In conversation with
Sandra O'Connell