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New Air India Express: No Business Class, More Direct Bookings
20.11.2024 - 16:33 / skift.com / Bulbul Dhawan
Low-cost carrier Air India Express is focused on the all-economy side of the business and on serving the smaller cities, said Managing Director Aloke Singh at the Skift Global Forum East Wednesday. The airline has recently merged with AIX Connect as part of the Air India group’s exercise to consolidate its four airlines into two: A full-service airline (Air India) and a low-cost carrier (Air India Express).
“Air India Express operates from the smaller Tier-2, Tier-3 cities into points in the Middle East and Southeast Asia,” Singh said. “Smaller regions are markets that we understand well. We are not in the hub-to-hub markets, and those markets are served by full-service Air India,” he said.
Air India Express no longer operates the Delhi-Dubai and Mumbai-Dubai routes, instead focusing on routes such as Goa-Dubai, Jaipur-Dubai, and Amritsar-Dubai. He added that between India and the UAE alone, Air India Express operates 33 flights a day. He estimates that in the India-UAE segment, the airline would hold a market share of about 20%.
Air India Express is not looking to include a business class configuration anytime soon, even as its competitor IndiGo has recently done so.
“Every airline is looking at and challenging their own business models. We are not going to have business class on the aircraft that we operate,” he said. He said that some of its aircraft have business class because a large part of its Boeing 737 fleet was configured according to other carriers and Air India Express acquired them.
“They have come with a business class but we will start reconfiguring them from April onwards. We are not going to operate business class but we do offer hot meals, we are going to have transfer connections over our own hubs to Air India long-haul flights and to other low-cost partners overseas.”
Markets that need a business class will be served by Air India, he said.
The airline has been undergoing a transformation, and a big challenge for Air India Express has been getting enough planes and pilots. “The transformation exercise was not just about merging four airlines into two, but it was also about the growth which we had missed over the last couple of decades. There is a massive re-fleeting exercise ongoing.”
He added that the transformation exercise also looks at how the new aircraft will be added into operations and how resources will be built to support the growth that the airline wants to undertake. “There are a lot of components to this transformation and each of them represents a challenge, but opportunities are enormous,” Singh said.
Direct pricing by airlines has been a point of contention as online travel agencies like Yatra have said this has led to reduction in revenues. Air India has also
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