The Hindu Business Line : Flight delayed? Get free tickets

ACTION PLAN: Capt Gopinath, Chairman and Managing Director, Air Deccan, at a press conference to unveil the airline's `Vision 2008' plan, in Bangalore on Saturday. — G.R.N. Somashekar

Bangalore , Sept. 16

Air Deccan has put together an action plan to improve efficiencies and tighten up on-time performance of its flights. For starters, it has decided to give away free tickets to its passengers if their flights get delayed by three hours. "We will give away free tickets to our passengers if we are not able to get them to fly within three hours of the scheduled departure time," the airline's Managing Director, Capt G.R. Gopinath, told presspersons on Saturday.

If Air Deccan's own flights get cancelled or delayed, the airline will try to get its passengers seats on other airlines and if that is also not possible, it will give away free tickets. The new scheme starts from September 19 and will run for a month. Capt Gopinath said that the airline was set to topple Jet Airways as the leading domestic airline in the country by next year. "But before that we want to improve our on-time performance," he said. For the past 10 weeks, 98 per cent of its flights took off within an hour of their scheduled departure and nearly 80 per cent of them within 15 minutes of their scheduled departure.

Vision 2008

Unveiling the airline's `Vision 2008' plan, its Chief Operating Officer, Mr Warwick Brady, said within 2008, the airline aims to become the lowest cost airline without compromising on security. It also wants to become the most profitable airline and largest people-carrier.

The airline has also entered into an agreement with Lufthansa for supply of spare parts within the country. It has also tied up with Airbus, which will deploy 15 of its engineers who will work along with the airline's officials to smoothen out any technical glitches. The same arrangement has been made with ATR who will deploy 14 engineers for this purpose. While Airbus was paid $3 million for extending this service, ATR was paid $2 million.

Press Campaigns

Mr Brady said the number of cancellations of flights has come down to 234 in August from 597 in January. The number of short-shipped baggage has also come down to 0.3 per 1,000 passengers from 2 per 1,000 a year ago. The number of customer complaints has also come down to 6 per 1,000 from 12 per thousand a year ago.

The airline will also run press campaigns emphasising on reliability of the airline and its goal to become the best carrier in the country. The airline is the second largest carrier in the country with a market share of 21.2 per cent. It operates 270 flights every day covering 55 destinations and has a fleet of 37 aircraft and has so far flown a total of 6.6 million.