Jet Airways Launches Daily Delhi-Milan Flight

Online, December 8, 2010 (Newswire.com) - Jet Airways on Sunday launched its first flight to Italy, saying it planned to spread its global network in Europe as well as within the country.

"We have plans to expand in Europe... Rome is very much an option," Jet's Chief Commercial Officer Sudheer Raghavan told reporters after launching a daily non-stop flight from New Delhi to Milan on a new Airbus 330-200 aircraft.

On the domestic front, he said the demand was so high that "we had to reconvert several of our (fully economy) Jet Konnect aircraft to the full-service ones (having business class seats."

"It shows that the market is good with our passenger load factor averaging at 82 per cent. We have plans to launch grow domestically. We don't make decisions to lose money."

Observing that Jet Konnect was launched to suit the demands of the market which then favoured low fares, he said "we had a flexible approach. When demand for business class arose, we converted these aircraft back to two-class (business and economy) configuration primarily for domestic travel."

Speaking on the Milan flight, he said while several European cities are on the radar of the premier private carrier, "the route evaluation for Milan came out much better which prompted us to launch this flight."

With Milan strategically located in central Europe, Jet's daily non-stop service would allow access to European cities like Paris, Dusseldorf, Hamburg, Helsinki, Lisbon, Madrid, Zurich, Vienna, Belgrade and Budapest.

Milan is the 24th destination in the private airline's international network.

"We are confident that Jet Airways will soon emerge as the preferred carrier on this popular route," Raghavan said.

Jet, which already has an international hub at Brussels, was "happy" with the Delhi hub at the swanky new Terminal-3 of the IGI Airport here.

"We had no problems in shifting to this hub, barring some teething trouble in the first few weeks," Raghavan said while comparing the "smooth" experience in T-3 with the major troubles that broke out in London-Heathrow and Chep La Kok in Hong Kong with problems going on for almost a year.