Vistara's emerging hubs

Mumbai airport was the largest airport in the country by passenger traffic until 2008-2009. The title shifted to Delhi airport, and Delhi has been going strong since then, with the gap with Mumbai increasing with every passing year. No wonder then that the new airlines which started since then, focused more on Delhi and in some cases even Bengaluru.

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Vistara, the joint venture of Tata Group and Singapore Airlines Group which started operations in January 2015 established its hub in Delhi. The airline- a premium offering wanted to be present in the Delhi-Mumbai sector, the densest in the country and also the one which sees maximum premium traffic. Yet it could get only limited slots in Mumbai. The airport in Mumbai had moved from being the busiest airport to being the most congested airport! Sister carrier AirAsia India- which came up as a tie-up between the Tata Group and Malaysian low-cost carrier AirAsia Bhd, made Bengaluru its base after initially announcing Chennai. AirAsia India stayed away from Mumbai for a very long time due to the lack of slots and focus on nonmetro routes.

Flashback

Vistara learnt some lessons the hard way. The airline with a lot of research came up with a configuration which turned out to be premium heavy and the airline was forced to reconfigure it to reduce the business-class and premium economy sections. The airline underwent another round of reconfiguration when it added one row of economy-class seats.

The airline faltered on many counts- from positioning itself as a premium carrier to opening up fares which had a buy on board as an option. When it came to flying internationally, there were no surprises when it chose Singapore as its maiden destination. When it did, the aircraft it deployed was the unlikely B737 that it had acquired after the fall of Jet Airways! Far away from its flagship product of three-class A320, the 737s were old, had only two classes of service and even after the refit did not exactly provide the ambience and comfort that the A320s of the airline did.

As of today, it has a mix of A320ceo, A320neo, A321neo, B737s and the Dreamliners. As if this mix was not enough it translates into a mix of mono class, dual-class and three-class fleet!

And then came the widebodies