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: page advertisements, billboards on roads telling you to take a leap into a new life by becoming an airhostess. And if cities like Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai took the early lead, now even tier II and tier III cities are catching up.

Take for example a niche brand like Kingfisher Training Academy, which opened its centre in Mumbai last year. The academy now has nine centres in the country and plans to take the number to 25 by year 2010. Besides metros like Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata, it has opened centres in Pune, Nagpur, Guwahati, Jaipur, Indore and Chandigarh.

Frankfinn considered the oldest player in the market has about 119 centres across India, 39 of these are information centres in tier two and three cities. In fact, the concentration now is on smaller towns. The idea, says Samir Walia, vice-president, communications, Franfinn, is to meet the demands of the growing aviation industry. “Since the metros already have centres, we are looking at tier two and three cities.” What is helping, says Walia, is the change in attitude of people, “The low cast airlines changed a lot of things in India. For example, with Air Deccan, even parents of children from small towns were using air as means of transport. That is when the industry actually came closer to them. They probably realised that sending their daughter in airlines wasn’t as bad a thing as they imagined.”

Today of course the story has changed completely. Monika Arora who runs Sky Academy in Delhi, an airhostess training institute, is pretty impressed with the enthusiasm that girls from the academy’s smaller centres like Bareily, Jalandhar, Rudrapur and Rohtak show. “The fact that they come from smaller towns only makes them aspire for the glamorous life a little more. They strive harder and their aspirations are much higher. In fact a lot of them are even more sincere than girls from bigger places.”

But if smaller towns have aspirants, metros have people who want to make it big soon, which is a reason for institutes with shorter course durations becoming popular as well.