IN THE eight months since opening its doors, AirCross – appointed in September last year as general sales agent for Turkish Airlines – has stabilised its business and is now looking down the expansion path, according to GM Carien Woolley. “AirCross is now over its teething problems, which any new company faces,” she told FTW, “and we are already in negotiations to broaden our client base. “We have no aspirations of becoming the biggest GSA in the country, but would rather let our service speak for itself.” And its performance in winning cargo volume for the Turkish flag-carrier is proving to be a good advert for the company. The airline withdrew its original service to SA in 2003, and when it re-opened its operation last year this could have been viewed negatively by the market, according to Woolley. “But,” she said, “their return to SA has proven to be extremely successful – and obviously, if we gauge our current support, the Turkish Airlines service was sorely missed.” And the AirCross figures support this assumption. “If we look at the tonnage that we have captured since the inception of the new service,” Woolley told FTW, “we can already see that our figures are on track with those figures pre-2003. “The extensive Turkish Airlines network serves more than 130 destinations worldwide – and I believe that our niche market lies in getting the freight agents’ cargo to those hard-to-reach places.”
