AI Express to roll out attractive offers for domestic fliers

To promote domestic operations, Air India Express, the low-cost wing of national carrier Air India, is offering free tickets in the domestic leg of its international flights. The airline is also planning to get into a pact with travel portals.

Thirty-seven of the 168 weekly flights that AI Express operates, will offer five free seats and passengers will have to pay only the taxes. The free seats will be vailable between January 26 and March 26, 2011.

“We are trying to promote our domestic flights so that when we formally launch in April next year, we already have a market. As of now our domestic legs are almost empty because no one knows about it,” said a senior Air India Official.

AI Express flights en-route to the engineering base in Mumbai for maintenance, will carry domestic passengers. “As maintenance is routine, this arrangement will give us 15 exclusive domestic flights connecting various destinations,” he said.

Air India Express has finalised a blueprint to launch cheap-fare domestic routes from April. The plan includes shifting base from Mumbai to Kochi, rebranding to Express India and improving utilisation of its 21-strong fleet from nine hours to 12.5 hours daily.

The airline will start operations for Kochi-Hyderabad-Bhubaneswar-Kolkata and Kochi-Ahmedabad-Jaipur. It plans to include smaller cities while flying between major hubs. The fares in the domestic leg are 40 per cent cheaper than full service carriers and will compete with low-cost carriers.

“As of now, we sell our tickets only through our websites but going ahead we also plan to sell it through various travel portals,” the official said.

The airline is also upgrading its ticketing system to a web-based dynamic fare system to make it competitive. As of now, the fares are calculated manually.

The airline will receive deliveries of four Boeing 737-800 next year, increasing its fleet to 25 aircraft. One of the four will be a replacement for the craft that crashed this May in Mangalore.