Jet Airways begins to offer seat selection for a price

Unbundling has been around for a while, and all the Indian domestic aviation players jumped on the opportunity to monetize their seats. Jet Airways stayed away from this game for a while, only offering their Platinum Members the opportunity to select seats for free. However, earlier this week, they have started to offer a Seat Select feature to all their passengers on the domestic network.

Initially, the pre-reservation of seats has been offered on the Boeing 737 network between the 6 key cities: Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore, Kolkata and Hyderabad.

Pricing is at INR 500 for the bulkhead Window & Aisle seats, and INR 200 for the bulkhead Window & Aisle of the 5 rows behind the bulkhead. The good part is, as a status passenger (Gold & Platinum), you won’t have to pay for pre-selection of seats. What is even better is that Jet Airways chose to leave out the Emergency Exit seats as regular seats open for all passengers, unlike Indigo and the others.

The bad part is, and perhaps a disincentive, that the seats can only be pre-reserved via the booking offices of Jet Airways and not online. I do not see many people going to the office of 9W to pre-select seats. Sigh!

How does it work? Seats are available for pre-selection till 48 hours out, when they go into the general pool for everyone to be able to check-in on them.

Jet Airways was already offering this service on their flights to the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Kuwait, Qatar, Nepal, Oman, Thailand, Singapore & Bahrain, wherever the flights were being served via a Boeing 737 plane.

I hope Jet Airways can work out on a system to make this work on the Internet, since that could really monetize some of these seats for them.

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