Vistara is the only Indian carrier to offer a three class config on domestic routes. While everyone offers an economy and a business class product, this is Vistara’s Premium economy review on the Mumbai to Delhi sector.
Club Vistara, the frequent flyer program from Vistara seems to be getting off the ground. I took a paid flight with them last week, the inaugural flight for the airline, and they added up the points for the flight and the welcome bonus pretty quickly. However, the points for booking on the web took about a week to post. The interface for the website is pretty rudimentary at the moment, and I hope the airline is working on making a better website. For instance, I can’t even see which flight I got the points for, and all I see is the sector. I hope this gets better and quicker. And while we know how to earn Vistara points, there is…
HDFC Bank and Jet Airways have offered the only mileage earning co-branded debit card in the Indian market since 2013. Here are the salient features of the card: 1000 JP Miles as enrolment bonus, 2000 JP Miles on first use. INR 750 as discount voucher on round-trip booking. 2000 JP Miles on renewal every year. 2 JP Miles for every INR 150 spent and 4 JP Miles for every INR 150 spent on Jet Airways. MasterCard Lounge Access. 5% off on domestic & international air tickets booked on jetairways.com The fee for this card was INR 1000 per annum, and free for the first year to HDFC Bank’s Premium Banking members (Classic, Preferred and Imperia). However, HDFC Bank has now…
One of the USPs for Etihad is to have Abu Dhabi airport as their home airport. Actually, they go hand in hand. Back in 2013, they managed to get approval for a Customs & Border Protection outpost from the USA, commonly known as preclearance. What this means is that the immigration & passport control formalities for arriving into the USA are completed at Abu Dhabi itself, and you don’t have to wait in a queue for a few hours after you arrive in the USA. I did, and it was a total buzzkill for my Abu Dhabi – JFK First Class flight experience. Ever since EY acquired a stake in Jet Airways, they’ve been offering a second flight to the…
SpiceJet, one of India’s oldest airlines, is going to change hands, again. Due to the recent financial troubles the airline has been through, where they were practically grounded for a day, the airline has been running a thinner operation than its planned 340 flights a day, down to 200 flights a day approximately. It turns out, SpiceJet will be sent back to its co-founder Ajay Singh, who will along with a set of investors take over the ownership of the airline from the current owners Sun Group and implement new measures to bring the bleeding airline back to shape. Ajay Singh sold out from the airline in 2010. There is no sign of the amount of the transaction, so we…
I really love it when there is real competition in the skies, and players are all trying to win the battle. Ever since the announcement last year that Jet Airways is back to being a full service carrier, I’ve seen shades of them upping the game. They have added a lot of new online functionality, and are in the process of working even more on the website. Book your meal for international flights as a premium cabin flyer View your upcoming trips online One new feature/benefit that has been provided this morning is the ability to cancel/amend bookings online, within 24 hours of making a reservation. Several times, you may make a travel plan but things fall apart or you…
Day before yesterday, Air India kicked off fare wars 2015 edition with a sale. Last night, Jet Airways joined them in the pursuit to bring low fares to India. As per this sale, you are going to be able to book tickets across India domestic sectors by January 18, 2015 for travel till April 15, 2015. The fare class to look out for is ‘B’, and you’ll need to be careful that this sale is valid only for direct flights, which means a hopping flight is fine, but connections are not if you want to benefit from the fare sale. Also, unlike Air India, Jet Airways is offering these tickets in the non-refundable fare bracket, but you will be able…
Hunting down a fare just became cheaper. Google Flights, which is a visual interface offered by Google to meta-search for flights, is now available in India at www.google.co.in/flights. The beauty of this interface is that you will be able to now search for flights by date, date ranges, calendar, location and even your budget for a random trip. Dates: Google Flights offers a calendar feature, where you can see one-way or round trip pricing for various sectors across days in one go. Take for instance this round-trip pricing on BOM-DEL for end of January. You can click on the graph, and customise by duration. You will get options to see various flights by fare and by time as well. Clicking…
Ever since I wrote about my inaugural flight experience on Vistara, one of the question asked the most was, is this the usual everyday experience? So, I requested permission from a friend and reader Vishal Mehra, to be able to reproduce his experience of flying Vistara Economy from Delhi to Mumbai here.
I just read the news a while back, where Air India was stated to have made a profit after a long time. And then, they declared a sale to celebrate the event it seems! Air India has on offer a Spring Sale, where they are offering full-service flights around India on narrowbody planes, and widebodies too, for incredibly low prices, starting INR 1,557 onwards. You are going to be able to book tickets all the way till 18 January 2015, and valid for travel from 16 January 2015 to April 30 2015. The tickets are valid for fare class E, so do look out for the E fare class on the flights. Some of the deals are pretty sweet, like…
PremierMiles Devaluation w.e.f. February 1, 2015 PremierMiles to Etihad Guest conversion PremierMiles to Air India Flying Returns conversion PremierMiles to Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer conversion I slacked up a bit on the PremierMiles conversion series due to Vistara’s launch last week, and an otherwise busy calendar. But let’s get cracking once again. One of the most interesting and useful points in the oneworld alliance are those of British Airways. A few years ago, they started calling them Avios, and this is the mileage currency used by British Airways as well as Iberia at the moment. Avios transfers frequently offer bonuses to credit card partners, at least once a year, but we haven’t seen any for 2015 at this point of time…
