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Jet Airways has announced a daily direct service between Mumbai and Paris to commence on May 14, 2014.
9W 124 will depart Mumbai 12:00 and arrive at Paris Charles de Gaulle at 17:50. 9W 123 will depart Paris CDG at 21:10 and arrive Mumbai at 09:45 the following morning. Jet Airways is targeting day time connections its domestic network.
While Jet Airways is promoting this flight as “the only evening departure from continental Europe to Mumbai”, it is important to remember that Jet Airways operated a very similar schedule on its New Delhi Milan Malpensa service. Jet Airways discontinued that flight citing poor performance, despite Milan being one of the busier destinations from New Delhi.
Jet Airways has announced special fares in both classes to celebrate the launch, and is offering double mileage credit on its frequent flyer programme for travel on flights in the first month of service.
Jet Airways will use one of its Airbus A330-200 aircraft on this route, configured in a two class cabin. 18 business and 236 economy class. This, however, is the older cabin product which does not feature the herringbone layout in business class. Jet used to operate this cabin product to Toronto. Thanks to our reader Rishul Saraf, this is clarified that this is a new cabin layout with the herringbone seating in business class. Jet Airways has reconfigured VT-JWJ VT-JWK and VT-JWM by removing 12 business class seats from the second section of the aircraft and adding additional economy class seats. Below is the old seat map from the Jet Airways site.
sir, the plane has herringbone J seats, the seat map isn’t updated, 9W retired the 2 ILFC 332s almost 3 years ago and reconfigured JWJ/JWK/JWM with 18J/236Y, simply by removing 12J seats from the second section of the 332.
What is the market size for CDG-India? It’s already very competitive with the ME3, European carriers, AI to DEL, and AF to DEL, BOM, and BLR.
However, I feel the real advantage is that this is going into Terminal 2E in Paris, facilitating connections onto AF’s extensive European network. In fact the outbound to CDG even connects to the evening JFK and BOS flights, providing a nice alternative to BA who operate a similar midday departure from BOM.
I am not so convinced of the viability of this route and particularly its timing. Isnt there already quite a bit capacity to CDG. Also on the timing, apart from a couple of cities in the US which have onward connections in the evening, the evening arrival does not help US connections.
As Sanjeev said, it might help feed AF’s strong European network, but do that many people fly to Europe via CDG. Not sure. Atleast i have the impression that LH is preferred option. I might be wrong on this.
Thing is, BOM-CDG is 60,000 pax per year, but India-France overall are 560,000 per year, ,40%+ of those originate out of BOM (almost 700 per day), so thats the real catch.
No 2 ways about the fact that 9W-AF are gonna collaborate and work together on this route.
Siddarth, definitely see your point about timing although it complements the AF 217 at 2am quite well. I think CDG is a better choice than AMS (despite the UK connections at AMS) as there is more O&D to CDG and the timing suits that.
In terms of domestic India connections at BOM, given the sorry state of infrastructure for the transfer I doubt anyone will choose to connect here unless its for a smaller place e.g. Bhopal. I know I would take CDG-DXB/DOH/AUH/FRA/DEL-MAA over CDG-BOM-MAA any day even if its slightly more expensive.
I think there are enough people doing BOM-Europe to make this work – there’s a reason you have BA/LX/DL/SU/TK/LH/VS/AF etc at BOM already. Does anyone have an idea about cargo being a factor on this route? Hopefully AF/9W codeshare soon enough so that combined itineraries will price well when consumers are looking for flights.