Qatar Airways, IndiGo to enter into ‘strategic business’ partnership

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 A320 Neo family, on 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 rest of the world (scissor operations) will be a seamless affair with a codeshare agreement. IndiGo has almost half of India’s domestic market share.