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Fiji’s major international airline Air Pacific Ltd and its subsidiary Pacific Sun will outsource its telephone reservations services to South African back office processing company, Mindpearl.
The subcontract awarded to Mindpearl is expected to be effective from November 1 later this year.
And seventeen jobs from both the airlines’ call centres would become redundant on October 31 – these staff would be offered the opportunity to redeploy to a number of roles at Air Pacific or be considered to join Mindpearl.
The airline said redundancy payments would be provided for those who leave Air Pacific, whether or not they joined Mindpearl.
Air Pacific’s current telephone reservations centres in New Zealand, Australia and Fiji will close and all reservations calls from these countries will be routed to Mindpearl’s 24 hour/seven days per week call centre in Suva.
Subsequently, the airline said calls from points in the South Pacific would cutover and in 2010 when the current North American call centre contract expired, call from North America would be routed to Mindpearl in Fiji.
Air Pacific managing director and chief executive John Campbell said the new call centre would provide customers of both airlines access to make new reservations, ticket purchases, queries on travel and alterations to bookings.
He said this would provide greatly enhanced service levels for customers in Fiji and improved services across all Air Pacific destinations.
He said that existing call centres in New Zealand, Australia and USA were contracted by Air Pacific to third parties.
“These jobs will transfer to Fiji providing employment for 29 Fiji citizens initially, with more positions to be created as Air Pacific and Pacific Sun grow,” Campbell said in a statement.
“We welcome Mindpearl to Fiji and are excited by the opportunities that their new facility presents,” he said.
Campbell said a competitive tender to manage their call centre activities was undertaken with companies from Australia, New Zealand and Fiji submitting its bids.
Mindpearl is expected to commence its call centre operations by January next year.
