Jet Airways grounded, Air France-KLM seeks new ally

MUMBAI: The Air France-KLM combine is open to other commercial partnerships in India after Jet Airways’ grounding, senior executives of the megacarrier said on Wednesday. “We will continue to look for opportunities to serve the Indian market better,” Welmer Blom, Air France-KLM’s senior vice president for India, Middle East and the Gulf, told ET.

While the Franco-Dutch airline is yet to identify potential partners, it is increasing capacity to the country by 25% to 1 million seats in the winter schedule starting October.

EXPANSION PLANS

The expansion includes daily flights to Mumbai and Delhi and new flights to Bengaluru. It will also include new products such as the Boeing 787 Dreamliner plane deployed by KLM on the Bengaluru-Amsterdam route and the Airbus A350 aircraft by Air France on the Mumbai-Paris sector.

In December 2017, the Air France-KLM combine had signed a pact with Jet through which the airlines aligned inventory and networks and sold each other’s tickets. It gave Jet access to more than hundred locations in Europe as well as to the US through Air France-KLM’s pact with Delta Air Lines.

After Jet ran into cash flow problems last year, its owner Naresh Goyal tried to woo both Air France-KLM and Delta Air Lines for a stake purchase, but without success.

Both Blom and Jean - Noel Rault, general manager Air France–KLM for the Indian sub-continent, said Jet’s grounding left 80,000 passengers, booked on shared flights between the airlines, in the lurch. Flight occupancies “reached the skies” and both had to operate extra flights and deploy bigger planes to accommodate passengers.

They bought tickets on other airlines when passengers couldn’t be accommodated on their own flights, said Blom and Rault.