News and Notes from Around the Interweb:
- You can request an invitation to United’s family day in San Francisco on October 13.
- ANA is offering a 30% discount on Air New Zealand award redemptions. Their distance-based chart has some sweet spots. This offer makes Los Angeles – Auckland roundtrip in business class just 63,000 miles. Of course you have to find award availability first! American Express Membership Rewards and Starwood Preferred Guest offer good value transfers to ANA, albeit not instantly.
- The heads of the Hyatt Gold Passport and MGM M Life programs hosted a live chat on Milepoint. Since they didn’t get to answer all of the questions online, they agreed to go back and reply to the rest. Here is the result, literally everything you could want to know about the Hyatt-MGM loyalty program relationship.
- India recently permitted foreign entities to own up to 49% of an airline. Singapore Airlines and India’s Tata Sons have formed a joint venture to “form a full-service airline based in New Delhi” with $100 million in initial capital and Singapore owning (and contributing) 49%.
Airlines in India slug it out in a money losing domestic market, hoping to survive long enough to be allowed to fly internationally. A full service carrier flying initially only domestically sounds to me like a money losing proposition. I started to write that ‘Singapore clearly knows much more about such things than I do’ but its 49% stake in Virgin Atlantic didn’t exactly work out well…
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Life chats are certainly better than death chats.
Unfortunately it is hard to find any J availability on NZ’s 777-300 or 777-200 routes. Trans-Tasman, zilch. US-New Zealand, zilch. The only 777-200 services with regular J availability are the AKL-PVG or AKL-NRT flights.
Tata Group are pretty smart, and know thier way around India. Perhaps they’ve spotted an opportunity for a full service airline that works domestically as well as internationally. Perhaps this is Star Alliance’s opportunity.
The downfall of Kingfisher was buying Deccan Air for the 5 yr requirement so that they could start LHR at once from BOM.
Who knows maybe the 100M is for buying Kingfisher now?
The downfall of India is the direct result of the govt.
This started with the nationalization of Air India and only got worse since then.
Imposing the 5 yr requirement on Domestic Airlines without it being applied to foreign airlines caused obliteration of the domestic sector.
Bilateral agreements that did not ensure equal seats in each direction for the Indian airlines caused the downfall of Air India further.
Indian air travel is cheap, but unsustainable. By the time they raise prices, the ownership will be completely foreign.
I disagree that Indian Air travel is cheap. The price for a distance of ~1000 miles one way is ~$100 if booked in advance. If airlines cannot sustain on 10cpm, they can never exist!