For Indians, Sri Lanka is one of the favourite venues for destination weddings. But last month, when a family from Delhi chartered a Vistara Airbus A320 to Colombo, it packed much more than the standard paraphernalia of clothes, gifts and jewellery. The family ferried meals from Delhi for all the guests and to cover their entire stay in Colombo due to the food and fuel shortages in the island nation.
Sources said the process has taken time because of a delay in leasing of aircraft. As per the original plan the aircraft were to be leased through GIFT City, Gujarat, but this is proving costlier than doing it offshore.
National Medical Commission regulations prohibit Indian medical students overseas to transfer programmes from one university to another mid-way.
Indian customers will have wider travel options as airlines introduce new flights from the end of March. While Malaysian Airlines and Turkish Airlines are resuming passenger flights to India after a gap of two years, Air France-KLM and Lufthansa Group will scale up their existing service in a graded manner in the summer schedule. Emirates, the largest foreign airline operating in India, too, is looking to restore its pre-Covid-19 schedule of 172 flights per week.
If 2019-20 (FY20) was an unusual year for highway construction in India, with the pace of work slowing down for the first time since the Narendra Modi government assumed power in 2014, largely due to the general elections in May and liquidity crunch, the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020-21 (FY21) only made matters worse with lockdowns and labour unavailability. The pace of highway construction in 2021-22 (FY22) has not been able to bulldoze the pandemic barriers in a year marred by two Covid-19 waves - the second at the start of the fiscal year, the third towards the close. With localised lockdowns and restrictions on mobility, highway construction growth in the country has now fallen to a five-year low.
The Tatas have the know-how to quickly close deals which can otherwise get caught in legal wrangle. In 2018, on the day the National Company Law Tribunal declared Tata Steel as the winner of the bid for bankrupt Bhushan Steel, Bhushan promoter Neeraj Singhal was planning to file for a stay order. He did get the case listed for the following day, but the judge did not admit it, deferring it until the following week. The Tatas used the narrow window of 48 hours to close the deal and take control of the company.
The consortium of UAE-based businessman Murari Lal Jalan and UK-based private equity fund Kalrock Capital is rushing to restart Jet Airways' operations, even though differences have emerged over who will fund expenses before operations commence, sources said. The airline applied to the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) for recertification of its air operator certificate in the last week of January. The regulator is likely to inspect the airline's preparedness to operate a flight in the middle of this month, after which it will be asked to operate a proving flight to demonstrate its ability to conduct flights safely and in accordance with rules.
Air India is set to enhance its in-flight service with a change in ownership from Thursday. This will include more variety in on-board meals, improved in-flight service procedures, and reintroduction of amenities. Non-vegetarian meals are being introduced in the economy class of domestic flights after a gap of nearly four years. Air India is set to enhance its in-flight service with a change in ownership from Thursday. This will include more variety in on-board meals, improved in-flight service procedures, and reintroduction of amenities.
Veterans in the travel industry, a well-known corporate lawyer, and a marquee US-based hedge fund have backed the upcoming low-cost airline Akasa Air. Founded by former Jet Airways chief executive officer (CEO) Vinay Dube, the venture counts ace stock trader and investor Rakesh Jhunjhunwala as its biggest financial backer with an investment of around Rs 300 crore. A person with knowledge of the development said most of the people were well known to Jhunjhunwala and Dube, who approached them during the conception stage.
'Our focus is not going to be metro to metro routes.' 'We will begin by focusing on metro to non-metro (routes).' 'Metro to tier-2 cities or tier-3 cities is where there is a lot of space for affordable, efficient carriers.'
In a bad start to the new year, hotels are counting their losses again. Weddings and corporate events for this month have either been called off or postponed. The blow has throttled the nascent recovery which had kicked in around August. It is primarily hurting the banquet-driven hotel chains, some of which are seeing cancellations running into lakhs for a single day.
Jet Airways is seeing a churn in its senior management ahead of its planned take-off this year. Sudhir Gaur, accountable manager and acting chief executive officer, is the latest to quit the company. Finance head M Shivakumar and head of management information system (MIS) Farazad Patrawalla moved out a few weeks earlier. Gaur had been part of the initial team selected by the Kalrock-Jalan consortium, which secured approval from the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) last June to revive the airline.
India's largest carrier IndiGo will cut 20 per cent of its flights due to lower demand as a rapidly spreading coronavirus upends the recovery of air travel. The airline was operating around 1,200 flights as on Saturday. Other airlines are being forced to cancel flights as states tighten restrictions to combat the spread of the virus, and people are dropping last-minute travel plans. Airlines carried 2,518 passengers on 260,251 flights on Saturday, compared to 2,794 passengers on 358,856 flights the day before.
A court in Canada has ordered the seizure of amounts collected by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) on behalf of Air India and the Airports Authority of India (AAI). Separate orders were passed on November 24 and December 21 on pleas by shareholders of Devas Multimedia Private Limited who have filed multiple petitions to enforce arbitration awards against the Indian government. According to a Devas spokesperson, more than $30 million has been seized to date under the IATA action.
On the itinerary: Luxury camping, tribal homestays, heritage cities.
Commercial 5G services will be rolled out in 13 cities in India, including the metropolises, in 2022, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) said in a statement on Monday. These cities are Delhi, Gurugram, Mumbai, Pune, Chennai, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chandigarh, Lucknow, Ahmedabad, Gandhinagar, and Jamnagar. "These metros and big cities would be the first places for the launch of 5G services in the country next year," the DoT said.
'We are not organising any large celebrations on New Year's Eve to avoid last-minute changes in guidelines.'
The issue of fog and low visibility primarily impacts airports in northern India and Bengaluru.
India's largest online travel agency, MakeMyTrip said that it is premature to assess the impact of Omicron variant on overseas tour bookings. Others in the travel sector however are worried about cancellations in the coming days as countries tighten travel restrictions. "It is too early to assess the impact of the new Covid-19 variant on outbound travel. "Additional protocols are already set in any case from several countries which will help contain the variant coming to India.
Under the new norms, passengers coming from 12 'at risk' countries/regions undergo an RT-PCR test and wait for result at the airport before leaving or taking a connecting flight
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