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Tata group may adopt Vistara’s standard operating procedures (SOPs) in flight safety and customer experience into the two airline entities that will be formed after merging the carrier with Air India, AirAsia (India) and Air India Express.
Discussions and initial data sharing on safety SOPs have started, said a person close to the development. Talks on adopting customer service practices will begin after the merger gets various regulatory nods.
Tata group last year took over Air India after a bidding process by the government.
The merger awaits approvals from the country’s anti-trust body Competition Commission of India (CCI), the anti-trust regulator in Singapore, the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT), the aviation ministry, and the aviation regulator Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) for merging air operator’s permits.
“It makes absolute sense for the Tatas to adopt Vistara’s operational SOPs into their combined airline entities,” said a DGCA official who didn’t want to be named. “The airline has been doing well on air-worthiness and compliance checks.”
Air India’s flights have been facing glitches. The starkest incident was a forced landing in Russia’s far eastern Magadan airport last month, owing to an engine snag, that left passengers stranded.
In the month of June, Air India had the maximum number of passengers affected by delays; ranked second among pan-India airlines in terms of passenger complaints (SpiceJet topped the list), and fifth in terms of on-time flight performance in a list of seven airlines, according to DGCA figures.
Vistara was at the bottom of DGCA’s list of passenger complaints, delays and denying boarding to passengers for the same month. It topped the on-time performance list.
Commenting on the Indian aviation industry’s monthly domestic passenger traffic, ratings agency ICRA said, the airlines’ capacity deployment in June 2023 was higher by one per cent than that of June 2022, but it was lower by 4.8 per cen in comparison to the pre-Covid levels (June 2019). It is estimated that the domestic aviation industry operated at a passenger load factor (PLF) of 93 per cent in June 2023, against 79 per cent in June 2022 and 89 per cent in June 2019 (pre-Covid levels).
“What has been acknowledged by Campbell (Wilson, managing director and CEO of Air India) and the Air India team is how they can bring Air India up to the same standard (as Vistara) and that is what they are working on. That is what we hope will happen with the integration,” Vistara CEO Vinod Kannan said. “It (Vistara’s SOPs) becomes more of a standard to emulate or to move towards.”He said there are “certain things in Vistara that we want to retain and we will raise them once we have the requisite approvals” for the merger. “Thankfully, we have maintained a very, very high level of processes,” Kannan said on Monday.
“The SOPs and processes that Singapore Airlines has have been adopted by us in the Indian context. So those are things that will definitely transition. What are the processes on the Air India side, whether they need to transition: that’s a separate question.
Currently there’s also a working group that’s being handled by consultants who are looking at what the SOPs are and how we can take the best from everywhere. As an integrated unit how do you bring the best together? That’s what’s being looked at.”
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