Jet Airways to cease BRU - BLR

[Atlantis]

Jet Airways decided to cease the new route Brussels - Bangalore. Last flight will be on 12 January 2009.

Jet Airways took this decision due to the bad economical situation and the bad situation all Indian carriers are in.

[tolipanebas]

How long have they operated this route now? A few weeks? And they are already stopping it?

To me, this kind of route planning just shows 9W is not a well run airline.
Decisions are not thought over before being made and are often revoked within days or weeks again...

Add the sauce of a global economic crisis to it and the fact that there is HUGE overcapacity in the indian market and I fail to see how 9W can ever become profitable like this...

[Megaman]

maybe good news though. If they open and close routes so quickly, I guess it means they have faith in the long run operations of all the other routes to and from brussels.

[sdbelgium]

How long have they operated this route now? A few weeks? And they are already stopping it?

First flight was on 31OCT08.

[regi]

Economics in India are in total chaos.
We here in Europe undergo the downturn in ( predictable ) steps. But China and India go through real shockwaves. What is happening in reality is that both countries are catapulted back into time of 10-15 years ago.
Millions have lost already their jobs in the Chinese coastal provinces. Manufacturing in India is really struggling.
Both countries relyed too much on exports based on cheap labour and foreign investment through joint ventures. The oversea parters from the USA ( just think about car parts ), Europe and Japan ( I hope you read the news that Isuzu Japan is also shrinking. It is the worlds biggest light truck manufacturer ) pull their money back because they need it to pay their debts and to use it for new investments (because they don't get any more money from the banks ) . And secondly the demand for those cheap products has also dropped. No more full container loads.
Aviation: I wonder what the recession will do with the delivery programs of all those birds to China, India, Thailand/Malaysia ( Airasia )

[teddybAIR]

Tolipanebas,

I couldn’t agree less with you in terms of the arguments you use to judge 9W…as to the judgment itself, I am not going to express myself. I am very convinced that it made a lot of business sense to open up the BRU-BLR route on the very moment the decision was taken. However, a mistake a lot of companies make is that their management looses its critical view on self-made decision. Consistently running a healthy business implies that you keep on questioning prior decisions. If you do not challenge them, by testing them with the most up-to-date and most likely scenarios, then how can you guarantee or argument that it was a good decision?

My own company just decided to withdraw from a country in which it entered just a few months ago. Back then, it made a lot of business sense to do so. However, the recent slowdown is doing a lot of damage in our industry. The companies that were first hit were those who did not manage to control their cash burn rate. And just like an airplane, if you do not keep track of the fuel (cash in this case) eventually your resources will be depleted…you want to divert, being sure you’ll make your alternate, no? Therefore, coming back on decisions – at least too me – is proof of sound management practices and the fact that management is not biased to naively keep faith in previous decisions. To stick with the aviation metaphor: if a pilot would insist to land at the destination airport regardless of deteriorating weather conditions below the minima, I would not consider him a good pilot either.

Do not forget, that as time goes by, you get additional information. If that info proves you wrong, you should resist the temptation to neglect that info and act upon it (in our examples: divert to the alternate and disinvest from your route in which you invested). It is not because you don’t want to believe something, that it is not happening to you.

Now, I agree with you that it is sad to see this route disappear. As aviation enthusiast, it is always sad to see a route being folded. Each decision has its advantages and disadvantages and in general it is hard for people involved emotionally in a certain decision to maintain a well balanced overview (let’s call it situational awareness ).

Nevertheless, since we are inevitably less informed in this particular matter compared to the management team who took this decision, let’s refrain from trying to blame management for disadvantages that come with their decision and instead respect them and trust that the advantages largely offset the disadvantages.

Regardless of the previous, I am not going to conclude whether 9W is a good or badly run company. I think other people are better placed than me to make that judgment…

Best regards,
bAIR

[tolipanebas]

Sure b.air and the fact 9W had first decided to first sack what was it again: 1,000 to 1,500 staff, but then back tracked on that idea less than 2 days later because it suddenly found out the market situation had changed dramatically overnight, right?

I'll repeat: 9W is not an airline like any other; there is just too much guts feeling, prestige and emotion involved to consider them a truly efficiently run airline, as evidenced by the weird things they sometimes do...

[teddybAIR]

Ok,

Apparently you know them better than I do, so I'll rest my case! Let's just hope for the best though...

[sn26567]

Jet Airways drops routes

Jet Airways will cut three unprofitable routes linking India with Europe and the US within the next two months. First for the chop is London-Amritsar which is used mainly by low revenue leisure travellers. It will end on December 1.

Next up is Brussels-Bangalore, a route which was started only a few weeks ago. It will cease on January 12, 2009.

That will be followed by Mumbai-Shanghai-San Francisco which will be dropped the following day (January 13).

This last route is a surprise as Jet Airways is reckoned to be the best option. It is the only carrier to fly non-stop Shanghai-San Francisco.

But there is some good news for Jet and that concerns fuel prices. Unusually for an international carrier, Jet did not hedge its fuel price so whereas its rivals might be paying a hedged rate of USD90 a barrel it's benefitting from the dramatic fall in the oil price.

Meanwhile the carrier is proceeding with plans to cooperate with fellow international carrier Kingfisher which recently began flying into London from Bangalore. It could mean that Jet code-shares with Kingfisher on London-Bangalore while the latter places its flight code on Jet's services linking London with Mumbai.

In other news, Jet Airways want to develop further connections from Leeds and East Midlands at its Brussels hub using bmi.

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