A few hours after Vistara, the new full service airline from Tata/Singapore Airlines showed its first look, Jet Airways made an announcement, which sort of made their life come full circle. A few years ago (7!), Jet Airways bought out Air Sahara, and rebranded them to run them as JetLite. Then, during the economic recession a few years back, they figured people did not want to pay the fares of a full-service carrier, so they used the same planes to offer JetKonnect, an all-economy offering which did not serve food. Then, some years later they took away the JetLite branding and called all their non-full service operations JetKonnect. Complicated much? Yes. This has created a brand manager’s nightmare with so…
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Tag Archives for S2.
Jet Airways, Indigo and SpiceJet offering Indian fare sales till August 4, 2014
A fare sale a week keeps the customers happy and flying, while the airlines, they keep ‘em drying out of cash. Yet, this is the reality of the Indian market and somehow we are back to the days 2-3 years back when airlines would drop their prices frequently to get each others’ customers to fly on their airlines. How they call it, is stoking demand, but I guess mostly it is the same people who’d have flown anyways moving their business elsewhere. SpiceJet, as usual, brought out another bout of fare sale this week. These sales have given them marketshare. They are selling discounted tickets till the end of August 3, 2014 (India Standard Time), for travel between September 1,…
Personal Electronic Devices on India’s airlines
A few weeks back I had written about the regulatory notification which modified the rules for the use of Personal Electronic Devices on airplanes while in flight and on the ground. Since then, I’ve waited for airlines to go ahead and execute the rules on the ground. I’m glad to report now it is no issue to use your electronics on board. Here is a collection of various domestic airlines and how they are implementing the rule at this moment: SpiceJet: SpiceJet was the first off the block. They claim they were the first to implement the revised rules, however they are allowing the use of PEDs/phones only above 10,000 feet even now. As per their COO, they don’t find…
Jet Airways homogenises convenience fee on all tickets
One of the changes that I’ve witnessed in the past weeks in the way Jet Airways charges a convenience fee / Optional Payment Charges. If you go back to 2012, Jet Airways had started imposing a fee to book from it directly, to cover the costs of the transaction, I assume. This fees, when started in 2012, was not very uniform and was charged basis the cabin of travel and routes (domestic/international). I heard a while back that this fee was not being charged anymore, and it did not show up when I booked some tickets for my family late last month, so I assume this was gone for a few days. However, as per Jet Airways, this charge is…
Jet Airways introduces transit between Mumbai International & Domestic terminals
Jet Airways has recently made some amends to the international passengers who use their gateway in Mumbai and need to transit further into the country. Till a few days back, one would have to arrive at Mumbai’s terminal 2, clear immigration & customs and collect their baggage, redeposit it with the transfer desk, and then go to Terminal 1B using an airport operated shuttle bus, which used to frequent about every 30 minutes making it a very cumbersome process. Now, they’ve secured a couple of gates at the International Terminal (Terminal 2) where incoming international passengers on Jet Airways flights between 0230 AM and 0645 AM at Mumbai will be able to transit directly to their flights from Terminal 2C.…
How to work the current fare sales in India: a primer
I thought I bored you guys enough with the barrage of fare sales that hit yesterday. There were one too many: Jet Airways, Indigo and then Spicejet. I know all of you are not being able to get through, so I will try and do the best I can to help you. First, lets go with Jet Airways. In the post I wrote yesterday, I told you the basics of their offer. There was a small footnote there, which I was not sure of at that moment, and hence not in the main text. Small tip: look for one-way tickets. Round-trip will not show the correct fares! It turns out that Jet Airways has now included this in their terms…
India’s biggest fare sale:book Jet Airways till Feb 24, travel till Dec 31
I thought 2013 is going to be an interesting year in terms of Indian aviation. There has been a back breaking impact of low fares on Kingfisher Airlines which wounded up last year, which allowed other airlines to bump up ticket prices. However, prices going up meant passengers numbers went down. To beat the heat of falling loads, SpiceJet went in first with a faresale of Rs. 2013 on any route in India, offering a million tickets, out of which 7 million got sold over the weekend. Now, there is a BIGGER sale. Jet Airways announced this morning a fare sale which allowed anyone to book one of the 2 million economy seats on sale from now till February 24,…
Jet Airways offers 20% off on reward redemptions till Sep 30,12
A couple of days back I wrote about the new benefits that Jet Airways was going to announce in the JetPrivilege program, and the official mailer went out last night to most members on the new program benefits. Most of the benefits are in line with the benefits I highlighted a couple of days back, except that the Priority Baggage Tagging benefit for Silver members was not there when the final mailer went out to members. In one stroke, from being a not-so-generous program for domestic flyers, it has become a good program to earn miles while flying across India, considering earlier you could only earn a paltry 142 miles on a BOM-DEL flight if you booked into the lowest…
Jet Airways consolidates brands, JetLite is now JetKonnect
Recap: The wisdom behind Jet Airways’ 3 airline brands lies in the 2009 period when air travel went down with the downturn. Jet Airways (9W) was always a full-service carrier on the domestic and international traffic out of India. JetLite (S2) was called Air Sahara, till 2007 when Jet Airways bought it out and converted it into a low-fare carrier (branded JetLite). Jet Airways always wanted to integrate both the carriers, except that there was a tax liability which hasn’t been settled 7 years down the line, and hence S2 has not been folded into the main carrier 9W. Jet Konnect was the new brand from Jet Airways, which was launched in 2009. Jet Airways wanted to create a temporary…
