Beginning June, the wait-listed passengers of Rajdhani trains will be provided the option of upgrading their train tickets to plane tickets on Air India by paying a little extra. The finer details of this arrangement is under final stages of approval between Air India and IRCTC, the Indian Railways portal for booking train tickets.
According to Air India chairman and managing director Ashwani Lohani, a formal pact between Air India and IRCTC has been inked and the details of the scheme are being worked out. Incidentally, Lohani's parent cadre is Indian Railway Service.
The wait-listed passengers will be able to upgrade to an Air India flight via the IRCTC portal itself. While the first-AC passengers having the wait-listed tickets will not be required to pay any extra money, for the second and third AC Rajdhani travelers, an extra amount of around Rs 2000 will be required depending on the destination, distance and of course the availability of an Air India connectivity between the city of boarding and destination.
As Rajdhani connects the state capitals to the national capital, most destinations are already covered by Air India flights. For Air India, this deal means filling up the vacant seats and thereby improving its passenger load factor. Air India is also pressing into services its smaller aircraft's and ATRs to improve the connectivity to smaller centers.
"The details are being worked out and we hope to have this in place within a week," Lohani said.
Currently, Alliance Air has seven ATRs in its fleet, including two ATR-42 that are to be phased this fiscal. It expects to have at least 18 ATR-72 planes by March 2017.
Lohani along with senior officials held deliberations with representatives from at least 16 states, most of whom also expressed willingness to provide viability gap funding to the carrier. “Several state governments have asked Air India to look at launching virgin routes connecting different cities in their respective states," Lohani told reporters after the meeting.
BW Reporters
Ashish Sinha is an experienced business journalist who has covered FMCG, auto, infrastructure, tourism, telecom among several other beats. Ashish has keen interest in the regulatory scenario impacting different sectors. He writes on aviation, railways, post and telegraph, infrastructure, defence, media & entertainment, among a wide variety of other subjects.
