Business processes…

I was reading my friend’s blog One dog said to the other this morning (yeah, I’m not bothered, I own this business!) in which he linked to this:

British teen launches airline from bedroom

A British teenager says he has launched a low-cost airline from his bedroom, becoming possibly the youngest airline boss in the world.

“I started flying lessons when I was 16 and my friends started joking about us buying a plane together and flying people around the world,” said Daniel Reilly, an 18-year-old student, from Maghull, in Merseyside, northern England.

“It was just a joke really but I took it a bit more seriously and decided to look into it,” he said.

Mr Reilly decided to explore how to establish an airline as part of a business studies course that he was taking as part of his high school A-Level subjects.

“I called round a few airlines and asked how they had done it and I slowly realised it was quite achievable,” he said.

Mr Reilly, who attends Deyes High School in Maghull, showed his project for Nexus Airline to a financial adviser who found backers for the business.

Initially Nexus will operate services from an airport in Liverpool, northern England, to the Spanish Canary Island destinations of Tenerife, Gran Canaria, Lanzarote and Fuerteventura.

Customers will be able to book flights – which cost from 50 pounds ($116) one-way – from Friday, with the first flights scheduled to take off on November 1.

In the meantime, Mr Reilly was awaiting the results of his A-Levels in business studies, English language, sociology and general studies.

“Most of my school friends are now going off to university but I’m in charge of an airline,” he said.

“I don’t know if I will be the next (Virgin boss) Richard Branson but I certainly wouldn’t say no.”
ABC News Australia

And that set me thinking on what it would take to get something like this going in Bahrain. It’s no joke, there is nothing stopping anyone starting a small airline here and if it is budget oriented, it will make a killing just flying between Bahrain and the other capitals in the Gulf on an hourly schedule.

For example, I have to travel to Riyadh on Monday on business… forget about taking a flight from Bahrain to Riyadh because they are only available in the evening, and it’s only one flight to the most important capital in the region! The alternative is to drive 90 minutes to Dammam airport and fly from there. They do have regular flights (3 in the morning and 3 in the afternoon I think) but that is inconvenient. So because of this I have to actually drive 4 hours to and from Riyadh.

Back to the real question though, even with the recently announced flat charge of BD10 for a business license which I hope will generate a flurry of genuine business activity rather than a million cold-stores manned by non-Bahrainis, the red tape that would face such an innovative and simple business idea as Daniel’s would be mountainous!

I hope I am proved wrong though…