Demands for India Flights From GCC to remain High : Visa Global Survey

Demands for India bound flights from the Gulf Cooperation Council and Middle East region remains very high and as per the new Visa Global Travel Intentions Survey, 2011, released  by Arabian Business weekly magazine, India was voted one of the top global destinations for travelers from the UAE  in 2011.India is home to a large population of expatriate Indians  in the Gulf region who travel on yearly basis to their origin country. The trends is seen in the operation of Indian's national carrier Air India,  which operates around 53 weekly flights to Dubai and its low-fare unit, Air India Express, operates 54 weekly flights to the city but still fly with overbooked capacity. Other airlines in the region have already expanded into flight offering to many Indian cities and have huge expansion plans for the next year to tap the under supplied market.

For example, Qatar Airways has said that India remains its key growth market in 2012,  and it operates 95 flights a week to 12 other Indian cities such as Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Goa besides Kolkata, the services for which were launched only recently. Indigo airlines, India’s largest airlines group and a low-cost carrier has also announced Dubai to New Delhi and Dubai to Mumbai flights service recently. Other airlines such as Jet Airways, Air Arabia, Emirates, Fly Dubai and Jazeera Airways are also envisage to launch more Indian services. The Gulf region have always be a high demanding sector for India flights and due to gross undersupply of airlines seats, the air fares decrease is unlikely in near future with the airlines focusing to launch services on newer routes. The demand from the Indian market is proving to be a silver lining for many International airlines as worldwide trends indicates a decrease in flights demands as well as slashing of airlines prices.

Jet Airways Invited to Join Delta, Air France and Alitalia Alliance

The largest Airlines in India, Jet Airways has been requested by the alliance of Air France, Delta Airlines and Alitalia to join their cross Atlantic Joint venture towards better and closer cooperation among the four airlines. All the Atlantic airlines have seen a reduced market both internationally and in their home turf, thereby forcing a rethink on strategy on their part. Jet Airways at present remains non-committal about any such plans though the cooperation can go a long way in collaboration among the airlines in terms of Code shares, common Customer reward programs as well as using each other facilities in different countries.

Jet Airways is in an expansion mode and any such alliance would help cost effective toward the expansion strategy. This also becomes relevant as Jet Airways is seeking inclusion in the SkyTeam Alliance even as its rivals such as Air India plan to Join Star alliance and Kingfisher to the Oneworld alliance. Jet Airways is the largest airlines in India in terms of market cap and is also in expansion mode offering flights to cities such as  Cairo, Dhaka, Jakarta, Manila and others.