Category Archives: Aviation

Virgin Atlantic has announced a new second daily service to Delhi Indira Gandhi Airport, commencing on 29 March 2020, offering 108,000 additional seats for summer 2020. The new flights to Delhi will go on sale on Saturday, 23 November. It will depart Heathrow in the morning complementing the airline’s current evening departure and offering more choice to customers travelling for both business and leisure between India and UK’s capital cities. Together with Delta Air Lines, Virgin Atlantic will offer seamless connections between Delhi and New York JFK, Boston, Detroit and Atlanta via Heathrow. The airline will also be re-timing its Mumbai flight to an evening departure from Heathrow, offering a more convenient choice for business customers. With the additional daily flight to Delhi and the newly launched Mumbai service, Virgin Atlantic will offer more choice to India than ever before. Juha Jarvinen, EVP Commercial at Virgin Atlantic, said: “Next year will mark twenty years since Virgin Atlantic started flying to Delhi, and the service continues to grow in popularity for both business and leisure travel. The second daily service from Heathrow is an excellent opportunity to meet customer demand on this route and, coupled with our new service to Mumbai, we’re able to offer even more choice and unrivalled Virgin Atlantic service to customers travelling between the UK and India.’’ The airline has announced some further changes to its flying programme in 2020: For transatlantic customers, the airline will fly its brand new A350 to San Francisco from May 2020, and coupled with a new weekly flight, will boost capacity by 40,000 seats for the summer season.By August, Virgin Atlantic’s A350 aircraft will fly to five destinations across its network. …

Adani Group is set to acquire 13.5 per cent stake in Mumbai International Airport (MIAL) from Bid Services Division (Mauritius) and 10 per cent stake from ACSA Global after the Competition Commission of India (CCI) approve the acquisition of shareholdings. The CCI has also approved an additional acquisition of 3.28% stake in logistics company Delhivery by the SVF Doorbell Cayman Ltd. This will take Adani Group’s share in MIAL to 23.5 per cent.

New Delhi metro station is now providing check-in facility to passengers of AirAsia India, SpiceJet and GoAir who are travelling through T3 terminal of the Delhi airport. Till date, the service was available for the flyers of Air India and Vistara. The flight check-in facility at the metro station would close two hours prior to the departure time. The airport-bound passengers will be able to do metro check-in for domestic and international flights from New Delhi Metro station two to 12 hours before the scheduled departure of their respective flights. 

Jet Privilege has rebranded itself as ‘InterMiles’, six months after stakeholder Jet Airways aborted its operations. “InterMiles will encompass both loyalty and rewards programme (previously, JetPrivilege) and the ubiquitous rewards and recognition currency (previously, JPMiles)”, Jet Privilege said. Jet Airways owns 49.9% of Jet Privilege Private Ltd., while Gulf carrier Etihad Airways owns the rest.

Star Air in a recent announcement has said it would start flights on the Bengaluru-Kalaburagi route thrice a week from November 22 with the beginning of operations of Karnataka’s Kalaburagi airport. The flight will depart from Bengaluru at 12.20 pm on Monday, Friday and Sunday to Kalaburagi district. Star Air currently has two 50-seater ERJ-145 aircraft in its fleet. 

The four-month-long runway re-surfacing work at Kochi Airport has begun and there would be no flights from 10 AM to 6 PM till March 28, 2020. Since almost all services have already been re-scheduled between 6 PM and 10 AM, the project period would see cancellation of only five services during the major runway re-surfacing period, a statement from the airport said. Domestic sector is going to have only four cancellations. In view of it, CIAL has decided to increase the check-in time to 3 hrs for the domestic passengers and 4 hrs for the international passengers, the statement said.

Hahn Air has become the first airline that issued a real-world ticket enabled by blockchain technology on the open-source travel distribution platform Winding Tree. It is also the first airline to fly passengers holding blockchain-powered tickets on its scheduled flight from Dusseldorf to Luxemburg on November 18. The first blockchain passengers were Maksim Izmaylov, Founder of Winding Tree, Davide Montali, CIO of Winding Tree, and Frederick Nowotny, Head of Sales Engineering at Hahn Air. “We at Hahn Air are constantly exploring new technologies and we are proud to now demonstrate our technical capability to issue blockchain-powered Hahn Air tickets. We are pleased to be partnering with Winding Tree, the most established company when it comes to distributing travel inventory in the blockchain. Our goal is to investigate and monitor the opportunities this technology holds for travel distribution, even if widespread acceptance is still a vision of the future,” commented Frederick Nowotny. The blockchain technology holds many advantages for the different parties involved in the process of booking an airline ticket. It is an open-source, meaning all market participants such as airlines, travel companies and distribution systems can easily connect and exchange transactions. All market participants can directly interact with each other and perform transactions without intermediaries thereby reducing costs. It is 100% secure. All of the necessary information is stored in a decentralised ledger which is verified by millions of sources and therefore cannot be changed or tampered with. 

In a recent update, Air India has announced that it will now connect Chandigarh with Dharamshala. The flight will operate six days a week, sparing Sunday. This will be UDAN’s 226th operational route. The airline will also connect Ahmedabad and Kandla making it possible for the common man to fly at affordable fares.

Lufthansa has simplified its Miles & More program and has introduced a point system for frequent flyer status, instead of status miles, which is easy to understand allowing more transparency. In future, Frequent Traveller and Senator status will be granted for life for long-term loyalty. The changes made to the program will introduce greater transparency and simplicity in points allocation, in addition to driving long-term loyalty amongst its global consumer base. The loyalty program also reflects the Group’s new, modern understanding of premium travel. George Ettiyil, Senior Director Sales South Asia – Lufthansa Group Airlines asserts that Indian customers, in particular, stand to reap significant benefits from the changes made to the program. He says, “With the latest evolvement of the Miles & More Program, the frequency of flying will be rewarded more than ever to attain and maintain a status with Lufthansa Group Airlines. This simple approach will benefit the Indian customers and fans of our airline brands, as we are personalising their rewards and uncomplicating the points accumulation process. Through this, we aim to enhance their experience of travelling with a Lufthansa Group Airline even further.” All changes apply to flights from 1 January 2021.

Somon Air (SZ) is set to launch twice weekly flight from Delhi to Dushanbe in Tajikistan on December 1, 2019. Bird Travels is the GSA for Somon Air and the flights are open for sales in GDS. The nonstop flight will fly to Dushanbe ex. Delhi on every Wednesday & Sunday and will reduce travel time to only 2hrs 30 minutes from the earlier 10-12 hours through connecting flights. There is a huge Indian student community in Tajikistan studying medicine, and there are many Indian pharma companies. Apart from that, it is a great destination for leisure and MiCE groups.