Air India bummer: After end to non-stop flights between Bengaluru and San Francisco, what options do passengers have?

Air India will stop non-stop services between Bengaluru and San Francisco at the end of February 2026, disconnecting the Silicon Valley and the IT capital of the world from the Silicon Valley of India. In February 2020, American Airlines announced that it would connect Seattle with Bengaluru starting in October that year. Within weeks, almost the entire world went into a lockdown. In the midst of the pandemic, United Airlines announced its longest flight yet between San Francisco and Bengaluru, starting in 2021. Both never took off; instead, Air India, then a government-owned airline, launched flights between the two IT hubs in January 2021 under the air bubble agreement. The route was suspended in early 2022, but the Russia-Ukraine war continued, and seeing American carriers stay away from the Russian airspace, along with additional airworthy planes, Air India relaunched the route.