Friday, March 24, 2017
Travel And Tour World spoke to Pankaj Srivastava, Director – Commercial & Board Member at ITB Berlin 2017. He discussed about the new flight routes introduced by Air India and the facilities offered by the new aircraft.
Travel And Tour World: Could you tell us about your new plans for 2017?
Pankaj Srivastava: Air India has got very ambitious plans as far as international travel is concerned.
We have added four new international destinations including San Francisco which is one of the longest flights at this moment. A special thing about this flight is that we go to San Francisco from Delhi using the Pacific route and return via Atlantic route so this is the first flight that does the round-the-world flight.
Besides, we have added Austria, Vienna, Madrid and also started Ahmadabad to London flights and in future we will be connecting Delhi with Tel Aviv in May 2017.
Thereafter, we would connect two capital cities of the world’s largest democracies which include US and India and have nonstop flights between New Delhi and Washington DC. Besides that we also look to connecting Scandinavia and Delhi.
Travel And Tour World: What are the factors influencing these new developments?
Pankaj Srivastava: So far, the connectivity between India and Europe was largely based on one stop fliers where the carriers were picking up traffic from India to their country and then to the rest of the world.
But with the arrival of Dreamliner into our fleet, since we have got 23 of them we have an opportunity to provide non-stop service now so that’s why the focus has been to give non-stop seamless travel thereby cutting down the difficulties passengers are facing while going over some countries and then to their destination.
So, we have been able to do a lot. This has been possible by utilization of existing resources we had and also arrival of new aircraft in our field.
Travel And Tour World: What kind of facilities can someone expect from both?
Pankaj Srivastava: Dreamliner is one of the best aircraft in the navigation sector. This aircraft is much lighter so fuel consumption is much less and we have huge business class cabin that is absolutely spacious and even in economy we have the best seat quality in the world.
Tags: air india, Dreamliner, ITB Berlin
