As Vistara Operates Its Last Flight It Directly Flies Into This!

Vistara Operates Its Last Flight

Within a span of one decade of operations,Vistara established its brand for product and services quality as one of the premier full service carrier in India amidst the Low cost carriers’ predominantly occupied market. The airline will operate its last flight on Monday, and on Tuesday, it will be integrated with Tata group’s Air India.

The wheels for the merger were set in motion in the year 2022 when the Tata group took over Air India from the government. Singapore Airlines had originally a 49% stake in Vistara and after the merger it got a 25.1% stake in Air India brand having far more recall than Vistara brand internationally it was decided that the Vistara brand would be dropped and Air India brand retained for the merged entity.

The merger is part of a broader Air India re-strategisation drive christened Vihaan.Ai an aggressive growth plan aimed reinventing the airline into an internationally competitive airline. However, when the strategic management decision of a merger between two companies was made, the public has raised a number of issues when it comes to the quality of the product and services that Vistara is going to offer to its valued clients.

Air India was under financial stress, and this reflected in its product and service quality which was seen as below the standards expected from a full-service carrier. While the now-privatised airline has undertaken a mammoth fleet modernisation and expansion plan, it still has a large number of legacy aircraft that are in a rundown state.

Maybe that is one reason why the Air India group has chosen to maintain the ‘Vistara experience’ similar for consumers in the first few months of consolidation. All existing vistara flights will be flown by the existing vistara plane and operated by the existing Vistara crew while the flight numbers will be Air India ones. It is for this reason that the benchmark for the new and enlarged Air India to follow is the standard that Vistara has provided.

“…the intention and plan is to bring Air India up to the same levels as Vistara. I would say that the expertise at Vistara is crucial for that to happen, because we’ve actually burnt our fingers, we’ve learnt things the hard way, and it’s only fair that we transfer that knowledge since the shareholders are the same,” Vistara CEO Vinod Kannan, who is also the chief integration officer for the merger, had said.

In the past few months, more than 2,70,000 passengers’ bookings were transferred to Air India digital platform along with more than 45,00,000 Vistara FFP members. Customers who had flights scheduled on Vistara, after November 12 have all received notifications, informing them of this shift in booking, which is now with Air India. About 140 systems have been transferred from Vistara for new merged fleet to function effectively. The other move includes 3,385 Vistara suppliers, 70 aircrafts flying more than 320 daily flights, over 3,300 crews and 86 IT contracts among others. About 6,500 employees of Vistara have also been transferred to Air India.