With Vistara, the joint venture between Tata Sons and Singapore Airlines, set to take off soon, the Singapore Airlines Chief Executive Officer, Goh Choon Phong, outlines what the investment means.
Edited excerpts from a media breakfast meeting for which Business Line was invited:
Vistara is something that we have always wanted to do. We have always been committed to serving India. As you know between SIA and Silk Air together we serve 11 points here with 85 weekly frequencies between Singapore and India.
We always wanted to be able to participate directly in (the) growth of traffic from India.
How will this tie-in with Singapore Airlines operations in India, are you looking at transferring passengers?
No. Vistara is an airline based in India. It has India’s interest right at the heart of the airline. Which means it must do and operate in a manner that makes sense for Vistara itself. It is not to be subordinated to Singapore’s interest.
Having said that, India and Singapore have a lot of connections and traffic movement. We believe that Singapore Airlines’ commercial cooperation with Vistara will help the airline.
Can you expand on the cooperation ? What does that mean?
The details will be unveiled by the Vistara management. But you can imagine about connectivity. Vistara is not going to have international flights from the beginning. So we can bring in passengers who will connect on to Vistara, and on to other parts of its network in India.
Recently there was the announcement of Singapore Airlines going into premium economy. By when will it be rolled out and will India be covered?
The roll-out of premium economy will be in the second half of 2015. The exact routing (on which premium economy will be offered) has not been worked out. The premium economy cabin is progressively being retrofitted. We expect that the Boeing 777 and the Airbus A-380 will be the ones which will be retrofitted with the premium economy cabin. We do operate the Airbus 380 to India. By default it (premium economy) would be here.