Thursday, February 24, 2011

Etihad to brighten Virgins blues?

 Etihad to brighten Virgin's blues?
When flight VA29 releases the chocks and accelerates down Sydney tarmac for lift off to Abu Dhabi at 4.05pm, it'll consummate the marriage — indeed carriage — of convenience between two aspiring airlines, Virgin Blue and Etihad Airways.

The tie up will see 27 flights a week between Australia and the capital of the United Arab Emirates, Abu Dhabi, with Virgin Blue's international brand V Australia today starting the first of its three weekly Boeing 777 flights from Sydney.

Regulators have allowed Etihad and Virgin Blue to engage in a strong alliance, including joint scheduling and pricing, a full codeshare, reciprocal technical support, staff exchange, shared ground handling and allow passengers to earn and burn points on either airlines with reciprocal lounge access rights.
For Etihad, it gets an important feeder airline to its network with the prospect lots of ex-pat Australian passengers working in the Middle East.

Virgin Blue gets access to an entensive international network — to Europe, the Middle East, India, to North America — it could not afford to build itself.

"Had we gone out and decided to fly those routes on our own with an equivalent amount of capacity [to the joint venture] we would have had to buy, depending on the aircraft size, between 30 and 50 aircraft — that's a massive capital expenditure program," said Virgin Blue chief executive John Borghetti, estimating such a cost at $10 billion.








By

NEHA JAIN

      

   

     



            
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