More Air India flights to Dubai from early June

Seeking to fill the void created by Jet Airways' suspension of operations and peak summer travel demand, state-run Air India has added capacity on the busy Delhi-Dubai, Mumbai-Dubai and Delhi-Mumbai sectors.

India-Dubai is considered one of the most lucrative sectors as demand is always very high on the route due to high business as well as leisure travel. About half a dozen local and domestic carriers connect 20 Indian cities with the city-state.

The new flights would be launched in the first week of June using B787 airplanes. Bookings of all the new flights have started.

"The flights to Dubai would be started utilizing the additional overseas flying rights by the government recently," said an official.

Preferring Air India over the private carriers, the civil aviation ministry earlier this week decided to allot about 5,700 weekly seats to the airline out of grounded Jet Airways' unused quota on the lucrative India-Dubai route. The public sector airline was also promised over 5,000 seats on India-Qatar route besides about 4,600 additional seats to and from London.

Air India currently has 13.1 per cent market share in the domestic market. It carried 15.19 lakh passengers in the month of March this year.

(Nirbhay Kumar can be contacted at nirbhay.k@ians.in)

--IANS

nk/sn/pg