It has been about three weeks since Air India and Vistara merged. Along with them, their loyalty programmes merged to create Maharaja Club, a new name for the Air India Flying Returns loyalty programme. Many people anticipate using their Vistara upgrade vouchers or, generally, new Vouchers they may earn in the Maharaja Club programme, so I thought of writing a quick post for them.

Air India Upgrade Vouchers cannot be used before arriving at the airport.

The way Vistara upgrade vouchers used to work was that if confirmable award space was available and you had the vouchers, you could upgrade in advance. The airline would burn the digital voucher and grant the upgrade. However, with Air India, the upgrades only work on domestic flights and are available on a space-available basis at the airport. So, for people burning their vouchers sitting at home hoping to process an upgrade, the bad news is that they lost the voucher and the upgrade.

To request an upgrade, you need to be at the airport check-in counter and request an upgrade subject to seat availability.  Once the check-in agent confirms an upgrade can be made, you can show them an active voucher in your member account on the app or web. Only once the agent verifies the voucher should you start generating the OTP. Then, hand over your device to the agent to input the flight number for which the voucher is used. Once OTP is verified, the check-in executive will hand over the boarding pass for the upgraded cabin class.

Further, you can only use vouchers for other people when you are travelling with them and are present at the airport. This ends the trading of vouchers that used to happen so far at Club Vistara. Further, each person travelling needs an individual one-class upgrade voucher, and only people booked on your same PNR can be upgraded.

How many Vouchers does an Air India upgrade cost?

Each voucher enables you to do a one-class upgrade in the domestic sector. If you are on a flight operated with a two-class configuration, you only need one voucher to upgrade from Economy to Business Class. However, suppose you are on a flight that has a three-class configuration (Economy, Premium Economy and Business Class); you need one voucher to upgrade from Economy to Premium Economy or Premium Economy to Business Class. And you need two vouchers to upgrade from Economy to Business Class.

All of these voucher upgrades are for one sector. If you are flying Delhi—Mumbai—Kochi, you need twice the number of vouchers to upgrade your ticket on both sectors.

How does it work practically?

Once you wrap your head around vouchers not being redeemable online, life is easy because you don’t have to check for award space. At the airport, it is yours if a seat is available on your flight in the new cabin.

Last week, I flew from Delhi to Mumbai and booked in the Economy Cabin for a 2:55 PM departure. I arrived at the airport early, hoping to get on an earlier flight using the Fly Prior feature (there were supposed to be 3-4 flights within the hour, and I was on the last one), and I was told that there were no seats on the earlier flights.

As I was going to resign to fate, I asked the agent if there was an upgrade seat available. She checked the computer and told me I could upgrade from Economy to Premium Economy if I had an upgrade voucher. I asked if there was a business class seat available. I was told it was available, but I would need to burn two vouchers.

Usually, I would have flown Economy on this flight, given it would be a Snack/Refreshment flight. Still, the retrofitted Air India Economy seats are too small. So, I was going to take an upgrade anyway since I also had two upgrade vouchers granted to me as an Air India Flying Returns Gold member when the new Flying Returns programme was launched in April 2024. Being Gold Tier vouchers, they would have expired in 9 months anyway (December 2024), so why not take an upgrade instead? I read the voucher code one by one to the agent, and then the vouchers were authenticated via One Time Passwords on my phone. The agent asked for my phone to input the flight number where they were being used (perhaps for some audit trail) and then marked them as “Used”. And then she gave me the boarding pass for my seat in Business Class for the said flight.

The interesting thing to note here was the tradeoff versus the Vistara system. Vistara used to ask the customers to wait at the check-in counter 90 minutes before flight departure so that they would be granted an upgrade if seats were still available. They hope to sell seats by that mark. There is no such policy in Air India’s case, at least for now. I was at the airport counter at 11:45 AM for a 2:55 PM Departure, and by 11:55 AM, I had a new boarding pass for Business Class on hand, three hours before the flight.

This is not to say that one policy works better, but since I was early, I could now head to the lounge and do some work before boarding the flight and arriving in Mumbai. In the case of Vistara, I would have had to hang around the check-in desk for 1.5 hours before getting an upgrade.

And soon enough, I was on board with the new Air India Business Class product, a story for another time.

Bottomline

With the Air India Maharaja Club loyalty programme, the upgrade process for elites has changed. Now, upgrades only work at the airport and depend on seat availability. Additionally, seat upgrades are processed only for domestic routes, and vouchers are non-transferable unless someone is travelling with you on the same PNR as you.

Have you used your Air India upgrade vouchers and experienced the new process? What has been your experience?

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