In one months’ time, Jet Airways is scheduled to morph into a largely no-frills airline with over two thirds of its seating capacity on its 86 planes transferred to a new service called Jet Konnect. The Rs 11,450-crore airline is hoping that the makeover will change its fortunes after racking up a post-tax loss of Rs 225 crore on its domestic and overseas operations in the first quarter ended June 30. The Jet Konnect service was introduced in May with nine of the airline’s 48 Boeing 737s the workhorse in the Jet fleet and 10 ATR planes and accounted for one-third of the airline’s seating capacity. By October, the airline plans to have 16 B-737s and 10 ATRs operating under the Jet Konnect service which effectively means two-thirds of the airline will be a no-frills service.
As part of the changeover, Jet has been ripping out the business class seats from its planes and moving to a single class configuration, thereby raising the seating capacity on these planes by 20 to 25 per cent. Jet has 33,000 seats on offer every day on its domestic flights which will go up to 38,000 seats once all the 16 B-737s convert to a single configuration for the Jet Konnect service. It isn’t only the full service airline that has started concentrating on low-yield passengers. Air India is also looking to enter aggressively into this space which means loads of competition for budget carriers such as IndiGo, SpiceJet and GoAir.
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