How Air India’s Bold Transformation Will Meet Passenger Expectations

I think more to the point is that Vistara now allows Air India the opportunity to be catalyzed and the transformation accelerated, and a new airline which represents the best of both Vistara and the legacy of Air India to be born. It was always part of the plan to bring the four Tata Airlines together. It was necessary for many reasons, not least of which is economies of scale and profitability, and the ability to further grow and to build an Air India that represents the India that people expect to see around the world and an airline that reflects the warmth and hospitality of India. So it's been a big project, it's been a long project, but I think the team has worked very hard and it's nice to have the merger phase of that behind us.

We've spent two years in the preparation and execution of this merger, aligning all of the operating procedures, the regulatory compliances and manuals, the IT systems, the terms and conditions of employment, now the physical locations. So it's not as if it's happened all at once overnight, it's been a very progressive process. But yes, for the moment we are operating Vistara aircraft with Vistara crew so that the product experience of the customer is what they expect. But progressively we will bring everything together into a coherent whole. That process will take time. One of the reasons we've actually held back a little bit on the Air India culture development program is because we wanted the people from Vistara and AirAsia Express to be part of co-creating it, so they feel ownership in it. That's going to be something we evolve into in 2025, uniting the organization behind the common mission of the Air India group. And I think people are bought into it anyway. It's the national name, it's a 93-year-old airline, it's an airline that's growing massively with plenty of opportunity, so I think we have the right ingredients, we just need to bring them together.

I think, put it in context. There are 30,000 employees in the new Air India group. There were actually five groups of employees because the Indian Airlines-Air India merger was never fully consummated, and so we had to bring all of this together. In the global context, airline mergers can take five to eight years. This has been done in a little over two. And when you bring different employee groups, different terms and conditions together, you don't pick the best of everything but neither do you pick the worst. So there is a mix of pluses and minuses. If you look at individual elements, some people can say this is better, some can say this is worse, but on balance I'm absolutely convinced that it is better for each individual group. And I think more so, the opportunity available to people is much greater than it was ever before, simply by virtue of the fact that we've got so many aircraft, there is such ambition to grow, there's such ambition to improve the product, that the opportunity for personal and career development is unparalleled.

Clearly our cabin crew, our staff, want to operate a product that they are proud of, that allows them to provide the service they want to provide. And it's fair to say that particularly the legacy aircraft that we inherited were not up to that standard. It just takes a long time. We committed $400 million to buy the seats to refurbish those aircraft. The seats have been in the certification and manufacturing process since then. They will start to be installed on the widebody aircraft next year. About a third of the narrowbody fleet are already done, but it will take a while to bring the legacy aircraft up to the standard. Having said that, we've got a third of the widebody fleet either brand new in the case of the A350s or with modern interiors with the 777s, and those have a fantastic customer experience.