Air India’s top management and other employees, including MD and CEO Campbell Wilson, have decided to travel economy class on domestic flights for official trips starting April 1.
Business and premium economy class seats will be kept available for sale to customers only. In case there are any unsold seats in this category, only then will the Air India employees be considered for upgradation, said officials.
“With this, we want to ensure that our premium seats, both business and premium economy – for which we are seeing huge demand – are available for booking to our customers first,” said an Air India spokesperson.
“We want to ensure that more premium seats are available for customers who are ready to pay for them. Like all customers, Air India employees are free to choose their seats when they would be paying for it,” said an Air India source. The directive, for now, is not applicable on international flights.
The move comes at a time when the Tata group airline is preparing to spruce up its total supply of premium class seats (business and premium economy combined).
Efforts are underway to improve the airline’s capacity through retrofitment of planes. While business class seats will see a slight moderation, premium economy class seats will increase significantly by 30% to 65,000 seats per week from 50,000 seats per week.
Since the takeover of the airline in January 2022, there has been a two-fold increase in demand for premium seats, the Air India source added.
The company is retrofitting 27 narrowbody planes and upgrading 40 widebody aircraft under a $400-million revamp exercise. Through the merger of Vistara, 53 A320 planes with three-class configuration belonging to the erstwhile carrier, were absorbed into the Air India fleet.
Owing to a global supply chain crisis hurting the seats category, the pace of Air India’s retrofitment programme has slowed down. The airline is now pushing for upgradation of the rest of the plane’s interior, keeping the seats upgrade programme subject to availability of seats at a later date.
IndiGo and SpiceJet are the only other carriers to offer business class or premium economy seats. IndiGo started with business class on select routes only a few months ago whereas SpiceJet, which calls its premium economy class as SpiceMax, has been offering it since 2014.