Jet Airways might as well become the the first of the Indian carriers to get a foreign equity investment, with the Jet – Etihad deal moving in the forward direction today after being stalled for a while. For a quick recap, Jet Airways agreed to sell 24% stake in the airline, majority stake in loyalty program JetPrivilege and its London slots to Etihad for a price of roughly $600 million. This deal, obviously, was subject to regulatory scrutiny and approvals. However, it turns out that there were way too many clauses where Etihad was going to take over control, including the move to migrate revenue management to Abu Dhabi. Also, Etihad was getting veto powers, so they had a say…
About Ajay
Air India won’t charge for seat selection
While all the carriers in India jumped on the opportunity to charge for seat selection to shore up their revenues, Air India seems to be opting out of the game, at least for domestic sectors. When fare unbundling was announced in India, all the carriers rushed to charge for seat selection. Indigo went ahead and wanted to charge you for every seat, including the middle seat. Then, the regulator realised its mistake, and limited the seats on a plane, which could be charged as special seats to 25% of the cabin. As per the news, this is their logic: The aviation regulator has directed that airlines can offer only up to 25% of seats for pre-booking. So at most, we…
Lounge Bites: July 25, 2013
Some quick updates from the world of travel around me: Neil Mills is leaving Spicejet, and that makes him the second airline CEO to go away from an Indian airline in 3 months after Nikos Kardassis moved out from Jet Airways. Media seems to be linking this to the potential funding they will receive, perhaps from Kuwait Airways. Have you ever had to cancel someone else’s First Class reservations to get your own client on the plane? These travel agents used to cancel/modify reservations for other passengers and get their own passengers on their way. They’ve now been arrested. If you miss your connection, it may now be the airline’s problem. Jet Airways learnt the hard way. Not travel related,…
Going RTW: Flight EY101 (AUH-JFK), Etihad, Diamond First
Introduction & Trip Index <Etihad First Class Lounge, Abu Dhabi Holiday Inn, LaGuardia Airport> Like I earlier mentioned, by the time I went through the secondary check gates (for US-bound flights), and reached the gates, boarding was already underway and I queued through a bunch of economy passengers to get through to the jetbridge. However, this was a good time to say hello to the A340. Abu Dhabi (AUH) – New York (JFK) Thursday, May 9 2013 Depart: 10:13AM Arrive: 04:41PM Duration: 14hr28min Distance flown: 6897 miles Aircraft: Airbus A340-600 Seat: 3A (First) Meal Service: Lunch, Snacks Once on board, however, everything was okay. at the gate, the purser greeted me, and asked one of…
Finally, you can buy lounge access on a one-off basis
One of the largest set of queries I notice on my blog is that for accessing lounges in India. While I know it makes life easy, airlines & airline alliances offer it to their elite customers only, and credit cards as well extend it to their card holders who hold certain varieties of credit cards. Here is the list of MasterCard and Visa cards based lounge access in India. For those who did not have lounge access via any of the other modes, membership to the Priority Pass or similar programs were necessary. These usually come complimentary along with credit cards, however, users would have to pay a $27 fee per guest per use, unless they had the highest version…
Citibank PremierMiles now offers 10miles/INR 100 on MakeMyTrip.com
Citibank is perhaps making a flanking manoeuvre in the travel space in India, ever since they got out of their co-branded card with Jet Airways. The Citibank PremierMiles credit card already used to offer 10 PremierMiles/Rs. 100 since last year for making a reservation with the airlines directly. This year, they’ve added GoIbibo.com and Yatra.com to the list of partners in the travel space who give you 10 PremierMiles / INR 100 this year. There is also Expedia.co.in, however, only for hotel bookings and Redbus.in for bus bookings. And now, there is MakeMyTrip.com being added to the list of partners where 10 PremierMiles can be earned per Rs. 100 spent, till 15 January 2014. The following category of bookings are…
Lost in Translation: the Virgin Atlantic menu in Hindi
I have to admit that for all the admiration I have for Virgin Atlantic airlines, I’ve never been able to get on their planes because I’ve never had enough miles to travel with them. So I never had a hang of what goes on in their premium cabins on flights from Heathrow, where they have a bilingual menu for their guests from India in English and Hindi. An acquaintance recently happened to be around, and discovered this hilarious menu, where the English menu was literally translated to Hindi. So, Pudding has become halwa in Hindi, and on the other hand, Rise & Shine, their label for their breakfast service has been left in Hindi rather than maybe just labelling it…
UK do you really think I want to pay your GBP 3,000 for your visa?
One of the by-products of being a British colony was that India got to be a part of the Commonwealth, but that’s where the vanity of it stopped. The UK government has of course considered it to be mandatory to make visa very expensive for Indians to access their country, and as per what I read the visa cost went up thrice over the first half of this year itself. The money United Kingdom asks for a 6-month visa, the United States of American would usually grant a 10-year multiple-visit visa to Indian passport holders. However, the UK seems to be surely losing the plot and the intent to get more Indian passengers who seem to be going over despite…
Which is the best Indian mileage-earning Credit Card?
The quest for the best Indian mileage-earning credit card has been on going. No one throws 50K miles our way to sign on a credit card here. Back in January, I created a calculator for everyone who wanted to figure out which was the best credit card according to their usage of credit every month, for travel and everything else. At last count, I had over 1,000 people using that calculator to make their assessments or validate their choices on which credit cards to pick for earning miles in India. Things change all the time, such as mileage earned, so I’ve tweaked the calculator accordingly. Here is the new version of the calculator, accessible from my Google Drive. The earlier…
Jet Airways: convert hotel points to JP Miles with 20% bonus
Apart from offering a bonus on conversion of your credit card reward points to Jet Airways JP Miles, there is also another recently launched promotion from 9W, where you could convert your hotel points from 9 different hotel chains to JP Miles. As per the promotion, which is valid between 20 July 2013 and 31 August 2013, if you converted your hotel points into 9W miles as per the following ratio, you’d stand to gain an extra 20% bonus from Jet Airways. However, my personal view is that this is not exactly a great promotion. Hey, for 50,000 Club Carlson points, I could be getting a good one night stay at a hotel in Europe in stead of 5000 JPMiles…
World’s second best airport, Delhi, goes under the rains
The Delhi Airport tom toms around its stature as the second best airport globally, in the 25-40 million passenger category. And I have to admit its good, way better than the sort of dump Mumbai Airport is which I have to use most often. However, there are times when the airport goes under, and this is the second time that it happened this rainy season. Here are pictures from posted on Twitter by journalist Tarun Shukla of the Delhi Airport which was flooded by the rains yesterday. Thankfully the drainage worked better airside and flight ops were not affected. However imagine the surprise if you landed in Delhi yesterday and having the need for a boat instead of a golf…
