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Air India misses its flight onto the Star Alliance

Like I blogged before taking off on my 3-week vacation here, it was going to take a hell of a lot of miracles to happen for Air India to make it to the Star Alliance. The airline is in a mess, and it works the standard Indian bureaucratic way. Here is the next big news that came, although almost totally expected. The 27 member Chief Executive Board of the Star Alliance has voted to keep AI out of the alliance for the reasons of not meeting the agreed membership requirements. WSJ published the news article on this here and the New York Times has it here. This punctures the whole turnaround plan for the airline after the other issue that…

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Air India: will it join the Star Alliance and should it join?

So it’s been the longest membership in the making for the Star Alliance perhaps and it might turn out to be an effort in vain after all. Star Alliance invited Air India (AI) to join the alliance in 2007, in an effort to penetrate the Indian market which was starting to make its mark in the global aviation industry just about then. The current AI used to operate as two carriers then, where Air India (AI) used to serve the international routes and Indian Airlines (IC) used to serve the domestic market. The whole process of merging the airlines, including the IT systems only completed in April 2011 and then the airline had already missed the deadline of joining in…

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Upcoming: Transatlantic travels, 36 hours and 10,500 miles over 3 continents!

BOM-BRU-JFK-CVG-SEA-JFK-BRU-BOM

So the much needed vacation is coming closer to take off date. End of this week, I fly over to the United States for a 3 week holiday, which will also give me a lot of time to post on topics I have on my mind. I am taking Jet Airways Premiere to travel to JFK via BRU (2 hours layover) and after a brief layover on Delta to Seattle (SEA) via Cincinnati(CVG), in Coach (yeah!). I have been on 9W to BRU several times from India, using it as an alternative to go to AMS on Delta. The experience has been good, in Coach as well as in their Business class (Premiere). The hard product and the soft product…

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The journey is the reward…

I’ve used this adage for the longest time, and yet I did not know that like many things Chinese that exist, this is a Chinese proverb. So thank you China for giving me one more thing apart from the iPhone that really makes my life really interesting. As a financial engineer, I work with clients and colleagues across the world and this still does necessitate travel and face to face meetings in the age of conference calls and video conferences.  This was my initiation into the world of airplanes and hotels quite a few years back. This was also my initiation to Mumbai, which is the commerce capital of India an upcoming financial supercentre much like London, New York and…

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