Edition 64
After a week of Vistara – Air India merger news, it was time for Air India Express to be in the news. I read a few which talked about reconfiguration of planes. Air India Express has inducted aircraft which were destined for Chinese and Korean carriers and come with Business class seats. That is not all, the seats, layout, color scheme, everything is a melee. The airline started by selling the Business class cabin initially as a “seat select” option for a fixed fare. Later, the airline revisited and made it a business class cabin.
There have been another set of news reports indicating the AIX Connect (erstwhile AirAsia India) merger with Air India Express being complete in the next few weeks and another set of reports which have indicated that the all economy planes from Vistara could shift to Air India Express. In the first pass, this looks like an information overload, however, a little deeper and one sees that the structure is going to be such that Air India has Airbus narrowbody and then Airbus and Boeing widebody aircraft, while Air India Express will have Airbus and Boeing narrowbody which will include B737NG, B737MAX, A320ceo and A320neo which over a period of time will become just MAX and NEO.
This actually got me to think if Air India needs two brands? The complexity of having two brands, inter group accounting, route transfers, seniority, sharing of resources, maintenance collaboration shows that there is a lot of handshake and the lines are blurring between the two entities. Why can’t Air India have only one entity then? The likes of United Airlines operate both Airbus and Boeing narrowbodies. If taking on IndiGo is the only idea of having Air India Express, then it may not fully work since the routes overlap with both the entities.
Will one single large entity with one CEO, one CCO, one CFO and one COO make better sense in terms of costs, structure and optimisation? I am sure somewhere this was evaluated but never saw the light of the day, with Singapore Airlines and Scoot also being a guideline to look at.
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