British Airways seems to be training all its guns to get traffic from India to fly with them. They consider India to be one of their biggest markets outside the UK, and they are focussing their marketing budgets to get that share of Indian traffic. First, it was the Silent Picturehouse last December, and then the new Facebook campaign this Valentines Day. I never wrote about the fare sales with Citibank and HSBC, but there is something or the other coming from BA in India. The newest promotion they’ve done, is to offer complimentary UK visas to people travelling on British Airways in this year. While this is a promotion being offered only via offline travel agents and I don’t…
Uber offering free rides in Delhi today
It is without doubt my favourite ground travel service at the moment, and Uber is spreading out fast in parts of India I frequent often. Today is election day in Delhi, and Uber is offering two free rides up to INR 1000 each for new and existing users both to be able to get out to vote. The first thing you have to do is to download the Uber app on your Apple/Android smartphone. The special promotion code to Uber in Delhi today, between 7 am to 7 pm, is VOTEDELHI. If you’ve never used Uber before, you can signup using this referral link, get INR 300 credit for using at a later date as well. And then, you can…
Lounge Access with MasterCard in India (2014)
One of the favourite features I have with my various MasterCard products in India is the ability to access lounges at various airports. Why would MasterCard do this? Well, to increase the spread of their cards with clients via Banks. Banks also look at this feature as a differentiation factor, and chip in for a few lounge trips as well. I realise I last wrote about the ability to access lounges with MasterCard products way back in 2012. Since lounge contracts change all the time, I figured it is a good time to write a new post. Under the program, holders of premium MasterCard products (issued in India by select banks) are admitted to select lounges across India, if they…
Clipper Lounge Cochin: the barest lounge ever?
Mumbai Airport Terminal 2 Clipper Lounge, Mumbai Terminal 2 Courtyard by Marriott Hotel, Kochi Airport Air India 682, Cochin – Mumbai, Economy After our three day stay at the Courtyard by Marriott, Kochi Airport, we were dropped off early morning at the Airport in a shuttle car of the hotel. We were already checked-in, and flying Air India. The airport had a Clipper Lounge, however, this was before the security hold area in the Domestic section of the airport. To access, I used my MasterCard and guested my partner using my Priority Pass. It was early morning so the lounge was empty, or maybe that was the way of life here, because it did not seem like this lounge was…
SpiceJet selling tickets from South India INR 1,773 onwards
SpiceJet is continuously promoting its new network, and after their sale around the country last week which just concluded, they have another one just for originating from South India. Since I did not have much time to post about this yesterday, I put out a tweet on this deal yesterday. You should follow my account on Twitter for deal updates when I can’t post about them immediately. The sale runs from April 8, 2014 to April 10, 2014 and offers some good fares for originating from Chennai, Coimbatore, Hyderabad, Madurai, Rajahmundry, Tirupati, Tuticorin, Vijaywada and Vizag. There is Kolkata in the list as well, and I have no idea when did they move to South India. You can travel between…
Kingfisher up for sale
The airline is long gone, but it has left behind about 1.25 billion US dollars (INR 7,500 Crores) of debt on the books of various banks in India. While there were a lot of push and shove amongst various parties on the leased planes which Kingfisher Airlines used, now the focus has moved to getting whatever value left out of the remaining assets of the airline. One of the assets they’d offered, and the banks accepted as collateral without much due diligence was the brand “Fly Kingfisher”. Apparently, some audit firm valued the brand at INR 3,000 Crores (500 million US Dollars) and that was good enough reason to lend them that amount. Anyhow, as per today’s newspapers: SBICAP Trustee…
$350 for Internet at the InterContinental? Yikes!
I am not sure if I am affected by this news or not, but this morning I was fixing up some travel reservations and I happened to hop over to the IHG website. I’m due to stay at the InterContinental Marine Drive later this month, because I managed to get a shot at the PointsBreak where it was going for 5000 points per night. At the bottom of my reservation page, here is the rate for Internet that comes up at $350 per night. Ouch! I think I should be glad that I still have some sort of status with the InterContinental chain to be able to get Internet free on a stay that would cost me $170 on a…
Singapore Airlines A380s to fly to Mumbai & Delhi May 2014 onwards
A couple of months back, a long standing decision of the Indian government to not allow the Airbus A380 planes in India was changed. As of end January, various carriers from around the globe were free to launch their A380 services to India. This was something I had also put out in my post on the predictions for Indian Aviation in 2014. While it has been expected that Lufthansa and Singapore Airlines will both start regular commercial operations with their A380s to India, it was a quest of who will do it first. And Singapore Airlines will take that cake. From May 30, 2014 onwards, Singapore Airlines is upgrading 1 service per day to Mumbai, which was earlier operated by…
Amex Travel Services: Plain Dumb?
I’ve been working to explore the feature set of my American Express Platinum Charge Card, which I finally acquired a couple of months back after all they threw in INR 40,000 worth of Taj Vouchers along with the other goodies. One of the things I’ve been looking forward to using is their Travel Services, which is basically a travel agent on the phone. Now, being American Express and all that, you’d expect that the Travel Counsellors, as they are called, would do a thorough job of researching the properties and flights before they’d send you a quote. My expectation of an offline travel agent, at least some of the good ones I work with, is that they don’t just want…
Jet Airways cuts Paris frequency before starting the route
Jet Airways, which has been recently seen to expand its international route network again to a small extent (most new flights go to Abu Dhabi!), had planned to add a daily service to Paris from Mumbai back in January 2014. At least, that is what they said when they put out the official announcement on their website, and added a double miles promotion to the route for the first couple of months. Have a look at the earlier announcement. Now, without any explanation, this frequency has come down from 7 days a week to 4 days a week, this even before the route started. As per the latest on their website, the flight will now be operated Thursday through Sunday…
DGCA asks SpiceJet to stop INR 1 tickets/ SG fights back
SpiceJet has been at the receiving end of undue attention from the Indian regulator for civil aviation (DGCA) for a while now. Last month, DGCA pulled them up for a little song and dance on their planes for celebrating Holi. Although the charges such as “The frequent movement of the dancing crew may have affected the aircraft’s centre of gravity during flight and created turbulence” were frivolous, DGCA stuck it out till it made the airline bend and commit that they’d ask for permissions before doing a similar thing in the future. Yesterday, I wrote about the SpiceJet sale for INR 1 tickets. While I could not locate tickets suiting my travel plans, many a folks did manage to secure…
