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Jet to boost services, fleet of low-cost arms
With air travel picking up, Jet Airways has decided to strengthen its low-cost arms — Jet Airways Konnect (JAK) and JetLite — to improve revenue as well as to upgrade service standards, reports Lalatendu Mishra.
With air travel picking up, Jet Airways has decided to strengthen its low-cost arms — Jet Airways Konnect (JAK) and JetLite — to improve revenue as well as to upgrade service standards.
The JAK service has been upgraded with the introduction of business class in 18 of its 28 aircraft. JetLite’s seat capacity is also being increased.
The Jet management has taken a decision to phase out all the seven Canadian Regional Jet (CRJ) aircraft from the JetLite fleet, which would be soon replaced with Boeing 737s.
Each CRJ offers 50 seats and the new Boeing 737 planes would offer more than 180 seats each, thus creating substantial additional inventory for JetLite. The older Boeing 737s are also being phased out.
“We are always very flexible to respond to market needs. At the moment we don’t have any plans to add more planes in the JAK fleet, but we will create more capacity in JetLite by replacing the CRJs with Boeing 737s,” said Sudhir Raghavan, Chief Commercial Officer.
JetLite has a fleet of 25 aircraft, including 7 CRJs, and 28 aircraft (including 10 ATRs) transferred from Jet Airways are in the JAK fleet.
Jet has also decided to procure three or four more ATR aircraft to add to its fleet. These planes with 62 seats each would be inducted within the next six months and the airline has not yet decided whether these would come to the full service Jet Airways or go to JAK.
Raghavan said the JAK service has helped the airline to regain market leadership and enhance revenue by 15 per cent over the last one year. Similarly, JetLite, with 80 per cent load factor, also helped it to successfully beat competition from other low cost airlines, he said.
Buoyed by the growth and responding to market demands, Jet Airways on Thursday announced introduction of business class seats called Konnect Select in its low cost arm JAK, which so far provided cheap economy fares in one class configuration. The new service will be available from April 26.
Eight business class seats will be made available in 18 of the JAK planes and these would cost 20 to 25 per cent less than business class fares in Jet Airways flights, Raghavan said.
These seats will be wider, and the passengers will have lounge access at airports and hot meals on board.