According to marketing magazine, group CMO of Malaysia Airlines Arved von zur Muehlen lasted 6 months in the role before jumping ‘ship’ and joining a Canadian carrier.
This despite Malaysia Airlines crediting him with being “instrumental in restoring the airline’s position as a leading international carrier and developing its innovative customer-centric services.”
Only yesterday, Group chief executive officer Izham Ismail announced in a bullish interview with Bernama that things were improving at the carrier and the five-year Malaysia Airlines Recovery Plan (MRP) was seeing impressive results across the board.

He said “…customer experience had also improved with market-driven metrics based on the company’s customer survey and net promoter measures showing significant positive gains over the last two financial years.” I don’t quite understand what that means but I do understand that this latest departure and the barrage of abuse the carrier is getting online and on an almost daily basis (See this earlier report with hugely embarrassing videos) suggests things are not so rosy down there in Sepang.
But one thing seems to be for sure. Despite the CEO saying things are really, really good, Malaysia Airlines is a springboard to better positions in more solid Western carriers because Muehlen is about the fourth Western C level executive to bail out in the last couple of years.
You don’t need this verbage bordering on an attempt to make it impossible to understand in his statement. You need one chat with someone that actually uses airlines. And that will reveal that people avoid MAS unless there is no choice.
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Hi Stefan. Thanks for your comment. I have to agree with you. His whole statement read like consultant speak with vague references and nonsense. Here’s an example “improvements in terms of cost base, productivity, information technology (IT) systems and customer experience were among the achievements chalked up by the company.” What are the improvements measured against? Where’s the proof? What metrics were used to measure the ‘customer experience achievement improvements’? Utter nonsense.
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