Comments
Singapore Airlines is looking at enhancing its participation in Vistara, the domestic airline in which it has a 49 per cent investment. Six months after Vistara took to the skies, the CEO of Singapore Airlines Goh Choon Phong, talked to BusinessLine on how the journey has been so far and what he expects in the future.
Edited excerpts:
How is SIA’s investment in Vistara doing?
Vistara has got a good reception from customers. The airline will continue to focus on service and quality. It has six aircraft which will go up to nine by the end of the year. Then it will look at how to expand its domestic footprint.
How has the tie-up benefited Singapore Airlines? It has now been six months since Vistara started flying?
The focus, rightfully, is on creating more awareness of its branding and services. The Tatas, who are our partners, have been very helpful in the whole process, helping in starting it and running it, among other things. (Vistara is a joint venture between Singapore Airlines and Tata Sons).
Apart from expanding its footprint in India, we are also looking at how Vistara and SIA can work together for us to feed our international traffic on to Vistara as domestic traffic.
Vistara has already introduced premium economy, which Singapore Airlines will introduce on the India route soon. What more can you do in terms of integration?
It is more than premium economy, it is about service schedule integration. We have many flights into India with Delhi being one of our major destinations. We can bring the rest of the world on our network to Delhi and then connect on to Vistara to wherever else they want to fly.
How many passengers are being transferred from Singapore Airlines on to Vistara currently?
Right now it is limited because we have not yet started the code-share. We are in the process of trying to get approval for the code-share. When that comes about I think we will be able to see more awareness about this connectivity.
How many destinations in India are you looking to code-share?
That will depend on how many cities in India both Vistara and Singapore Airlines fly to when the code-share agreement is allowed.
Wherever possible we will like to do it. We will have to look at what is permissible under the Air Services Agreement (between India and Singapore).
(This correspondent is in Miami at the invitation of the International Transport Authority)
Comments
COMMENT NOW
Comments
Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.
We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of TheHindu Businessline and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.