Air India starts direct flights to Sydney, Melbourne

Becoming the first airlines to bring Dreamliner on the Australian soil with its triangular direct flights to Sydney and Melbourne, Air India (AI) is now eyeing on direct services from the two cities separately to Delhi.

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“We are trying to see how Australia will commercially response to us. We feel its an excellent flight with least possible time to take to come to India,” Air India chairman Rohit Nandan told reporters.

“We are offering the best product in the world. We certainly expect that we will get a massive response from here,” he said. “Our aim is as soon as we commercially stabilise and we have the equipments, we will be flying directly to Sydney and directly to Melbourne all seven days as week,” Nandan said.

He said the response so for the bookings have been good and the jets which has a total capacity of 256 seats were flying with at least 200 filled seats. “Our flights are booked by upto 80 percent and it is quite a success for the airlines,” he said, adding that to start the direct flights separately to the two Australian cities, there were some regulatory issues which needed to be sorted out with the Australian side.

In regards to marketing strategies to tap travellers from Australia, Nandan said that the airlines has been in touch with the business councils of the two countries.

“We have been trying to penetrate into agencies, agents and we will be soon appointing a GSA very soon who will have its own network of agents. Besides this we will be reaching out to the Indian community,” he said.