IndiGo eyes code-share deal with Qatar Airways
NEW DELHI: Qatar Airways has for years repeatedly expressed a desire to pick up a stake in India’s largest airline IndiGo. Now the two aviation giants will finally make a “strategic business announcement” on Thursday, which could be of a code-share for now. Qatar Airways group chief executive Akbar Al Baker is coming to Delhi, where he and IndiGo CEO Ronojoy Dutta “talk about the vision and future for both the airlines”, said a joint invite by the airline for this event.
The timing is crucial as Qatar-IndiGo have always been seen as a likely contender to bid for Air India if the government gets the divestment conditions right this time. Also, IndiGo’s medium-haul experience on its single-aisle Airbus A320neo family on the Delhi-Istanbul route has not exactly left flyers happy. So, a Jet-Etihad type of structure — where IndiGo flies its single-aisles to Doha from numerous Indian cities and provides the feed for Qatar’s wide-bodies to the rest of the world (scissor operations) — will be a seamless affair with a code-share agreement making eminent business sense. Indi-Go has almost half of India’s domestic market share.
