Air India to offer first class seats in A350-1000 planes

New Delhi: Air India will have first class seats in its large wide body A350-1000 planes, with the airline seeing opportunities in the airline's network where these seats will work well as the airline pursues efforts to have a larger pie of the global skies.

Air India's Chief Commercial Officer Nipun Aggarwal said first class is something that most of the top airlines still have a niche on some of the large and prominent routes.

"It is not a product that is going away. Many of the top airlines are building their next generation first class products. We are not the only ones doing it. We do feel that there are some opportunities in our network where that product will work well," he said at a media briefing earlier this week.

The fleet size of Air India now is 202 planes, including 67 wide body ones. Among them, 27 are B777s, and 40 are B787s.

Of the 67 wide body planes, all legacy B777s and some leased B777s have first class seats.

"To compete with the best airlines you need to have first class, it is an aspirational product, it defines how you run and build an airline... we are putting it on A350-1000 aircraft... some of them will have the product.

"It takes time to develop the product," Aggarwal said.

The large wide body aircraft -- A350-1000s and B777Xs -- will have 325-400 seats. These planes are set to be inducted in the coming years and A350-1000 is anticipated in the next two years.

"It is important to have that product (first class) as it pulls the airline up... it will be mostly the mega cities; London, New York are good first class markets. Even if you have a private jet, you cannot fly to the US without one stop. If you have a first class product you can fly direct and reach faster," he said.

Air India also has three other wide body planes. Medium wide body aircraft -- A350-900 and B787-9 -- that have 300-325 seats -- and small wide body plane -- B787-8 having 250-300 seats.

The retrofit of wide body planes, starting with Boeing 787s, will commence this year while the retrofit of 27 legacy Airbus 320 neos is expected to be completed by the middle of 2025.

Air India serves around 63 million passengers and most of them fly domestic or short-haul international. These flights are operated with narrow body aircraft.

Almost the entire narrow bodies, which are serving almost 80 per cent of the customers, will see a new retrofitted and modern product. They will see good product in place by the second half of this year, Aggarwal said.

LEGACY BOEING 777 AIRCRAFT

There have been multiple instances of delays, cancellations and technical issues with some legacy Boeing 777 planes that are mostly used to operate ultra long haul flights to places like Canada and the US.

While acknowledging that the legacy Boeing 777 planes have not performed as well as anticipated, Aggarwal said the airline has kept more buffer than earlier.

Air India has 27 Boeing 777 aircraft, including 16 legacy ones.

"We are watching every month and as and when we are confident about the aircraft performance, we will utilise them more. Till the time we have that confidence, we are keeping some buffer in the deployment so that if the aircraft goes down, we have alternatives available with us with which we can still maintain the flight," he noted.

Whether the curtailment of legacy Boeing 777 deployment could also mean fewer ultra long-haul flights, Aggarwal said, "Whatever we have we will maintain. We are not curtailing that."

He also mentioned that whether the airline will add more flights "will be a function of whether we can extract more performance out of the existing fleet or whether we get more aircraft".

The retrofit of legacy Boeing 777 aircraft will start early next year.

WIDE BODY PLANES

In response to queries on whether Air India is looking at dry leasing or wet leasing of aircraft, Aggarwal said the airline is looking for capacity and added that getting a wide body aircraft in the market is extremely challenging.

"Whenever we take such wide body capacity from the market, it comes with an old product... It has its own challenges and harmonising those aircraft and integrating those aircraft into your fleet, network has its own challenges," he said.

He expressed hope of starting to get the aircraft it has ordered and added, "...we never say no to a good aircraft".

According to Aggarwal, the airline is not looking at wet leasing planes now.

"We will start getting the wide bodies this year itself and then more from next year," he said.

However, he did not give a firm number saying, "I think OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) still don't know what they will be able to deliver".

Currently, Air India has 67 wide body planes -- 27 Boeing 777s, 34 Boeing 787s, and six A350s.

LOYALTY PROGRAMME & CORPORATE TRAVEL

Aggarwal said the entire corporate product and pricing have been revamped. Also, the airline is in discussions with the corporates on how it can meet their needs holistically, "With the merger of Vistara, that number is improving further because of the ring fencing we have done on the metro-to-metro route and the experience is there now is much better than what we had pre-merger," he said.

On the metro routes, the corporate traffic is around 25 per cent.

Aggarwal said there will soon be a common group loyalty programme that will include Air India Express customers and the focus is on building strong partnerships.

Currently, the loyalty programme 'Maharaja Club' has more than 10.3 million members.