Ground Support Worldwide - 31

GROUND SERVICE
PROVIDERS

that you know what you're doing and they
don't necessarily want to take a chance with a
$100 million airplane in taking someone who's
green in that realm and putting them out on
their ramp."
Each respondent to an RFP determines how
best to staff the operational demand, what
equipment will be needed to be provided and
what unique challenges the given airport or
service will present. Then the ground handler puts its best effort at a response forward.
Hough notes, however, that price is often not
the sole determining factor for an airline.
"Carriers will narrow it down to those that
seem to be clustered around the best price
point and have the greatest capacity to do a
good job. Most of our partners do not consider
price as the sole determining factor. We have
seen an important shift to the level of quality
they will receive and we consistently market
this as the 'cost per quality unit' equation,"
Hough says.
Reputation, Mark Rudkin, AccuFleet's
director of sales and marketing, agrees is one
of the critical factors.
"A lot of it comes from reputation. A lot of
it comes from trust," he says. "Making sure
that the flight isn't going to be late because of
something that you, as the vendor, is doing is
crucial. So, having the reputation and maintaining that level of experience and trustworthiness for our airlines is a big driver."

More Than Money
With money not being as large of a deciding
factor, the field between a regional and global
service provider becomes more even. Both
AccuFleet and GAT say they are never in the
position where they must submit a bid that is
too low to stay competitive.
"We guard against it [submitting unsustainably low bids] by being committed to our
values. Everyone on the GAT team knows if

we cannot be sustainable, it will only damage
our reputation in the long run. It is tempting to
lower price to continue our growth trajectory,
but we know that doing so will destroy the
foundation of what we have built," Hough says.
"We don't submit a bid to just gain work,"
says Giacona. "Our first and most important
thing that we do is we submit a bid that is
realistic in the sense that we will not go to
a customer or a potential customer and say,
'Hey, this is the lowest price I can offer and
I'm getting to it because while you require five
people, I'm going to put down three.'
"We would rather go to a customer and say,
'Look, we know we're not the lowest bidder, but
this is realistically what we need to do the job,'
and we'll explain to our customer exactly how
we got to that point. We want to be upfront and
honest when we do a bid."
Rudkin adds that AccuFleet drafts a
detailed bid model for each proposal, popu-

lated with every assumption they are making
for every market and every service line, which
allows for their pricing models to be transparent and easily visible for carriers.
"They can have trust and peace of mind that
it isn't just a number that we're throwing out to
see whether or not it will stick, but rather it's
a well thought out pricing model that comes
from us actually looking at the numbers and
doing the work," Rudkin says.
AccuFleet's ability to be transparent is
achieved with the help of iRod, AccuFleet's
proprietary in-house system that logs everything their employees do for a carrier.
"When the airplane arrives, we take photos
of the entire airplane upon arrival showing
that there's no damage to the airplane, showing that we're at the airplane providing the
service. When we unload the airplane, we
go onboard and show that all of the bins are
empty, all of the bags have been removed, so

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Ground Support Worldwide

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