Jet opens up Europe, US to South India

With two new international flights from Chennai and Bengaluru starting this October, Jet Airways will effectively open up the continents of Europe and North America to South India.

HAZEL JAIN

Expecting a load factor of more than 85 per cent right from the beginning on its yet-to-start, nonstop services on the Chennai-Paris and Bengaluru-Amsterdam routes, Jet Airways is buoyant about these new international routes. Jayaraj Shanmugam, Chief Commercial Officer, Jet Airways, reiterates this and says, “Since these new services are based on an already-existing demand, we expect a good load. What our customers want is direct connectivity and our new services will give them that. Having said that, the idea behind starting these services is not just to get our customers to Paris or Amsterdam; it’s much beyond that. It is about opening up the whole of Europe and the United States to them. We are talking about 34 codeshare destinations in Europe – if you include interlines, then it is another 30 destinations – and 24 destinations to the United States. Once they are in North America, it is about 200 domestic connections.”

The two new international flights will commence from October 29, 2017. These are in addition to the third daily non-stop service from Mumbai to London Heathrow, starting around the same time. Introducing Chennai and Bengaluru direct flights also indicates a strategy to develop hubs in South India. “For the longest time, we had Mumbai and Delhi as our key hubs in India for most of our international flights. We used to fly from South India earlier in the 2000s – Chennai to Brussels and Bengaluru to Brussels. We stopped after just one year of service because of financial crisis. In the last one or two years, a lot of customers from that part of India have started asking for direct flights from their cities. We studied the market and found that it has grown from eight to ten per cent,” Shanmugam adds.

Jet Airways will have codeshare partners in this initiative – Air France, KLM, Delta and Virgin Atlantic. “I don’t think any other airline out of India offers the option of going through one gateway and coming back via another. With us, passengers can fly to Amsterdam and go on to stay in the US and from there fly to London or Paris and come back.

He expects a mix of business travellers, tourists and student traffic on these two routes. To support them, the airline has also tweaked some of the domestic connections between Chennai and Bengaluru as part of its summer schedule for the domestic market. These are expected to be made from surrounding cities such as Mangalore, Madurai and Coimbatore since bookings are also originating from the secondary cities in the south.

In terms of promoting these products, Jet participated in a four-city roadshow with Atout France in Bengaluru, Chennai, Mumbai and Delhi. It is also working with the Netherlands Board of Tourism and Conventions for joint promotions.

New flight info

• The two new international flights will commence from October 29, 2017.
• These are in addition to the third daily non-stop service from Mumbai to London Heathrow, starting around the same time.