New Delhi: American Airlines is in the process of obtaining necessary approvals from the US government for its ‘codeshare’ agreement with airline IndiGo and the agreement is expected to come into force by March 2022. A senior official of the American company gave this information. American Airlines and IndiGo announced in September that they had entered into a codeshare agreement, which would allow the US company to sell seats on Indian company flights on its distribution system on 29 routes.
In aviation parlance, with a codeshare agreement, airlines can sell tickets for their flights to each other to give passengers more destination options. The American company resumed New York-Delhi flight service on November 12 after a gap of 10 years. American Airlines Managing Director (Sales) Tom Latig told PTI in an interview that the airline’s Seattle-Bengaluru flight service will start on March 25 instead of the earlier scheduled time of January 4. “We have not yet seen an improvement in the corporate journey. We are aware that the route (Seattle-Bengaluru) will depend heavily especially on corporate traffic and we have decided to extend the date.”
He said the airline has entered into more than 2,000 agreements in the US with various companies. India-US routes and Indo-Europe routes are dominated by airlines such as Qatar Airways and Emirates Airlines, which offer ‘one-stop’ flights. Asked how he sees the rivalry with Gulf carriers on the Indo-US routes, Latting said, “We are hopeful that we will definitely get traffic on our ‘one-stop’ services.”
He said, “We are hopeful that traffic from airlines bringing passengers through third countries (one-stop flights) will come to our company. That will be our goal.” Asked whether the Indian government should resume scheduled international flight services, Latig said, “It is really for the government to decide when they will restore it and how many flights will be allowed.” He said American Airlines is in the process of getting necessary approvals from the US government for a codeshare agreement with IndiGo. “Once all the approvals are in place, we will go to the implementation phase and we expect it to be implemented in the first quarter of 2022,” he said.
