Hot meals may return on all Air India flights, will budget carriers follow suit?

When competitors are dropping fares but charging for every little service including food on board, Air India wants to pamper passengers. There is a thinking within the airline that instead of offering only biscuits for flights which are upto an hour, it should offer hot meals. The practice of offering just biscuits was started sometime back as the airline realised there was no sense in offering complimentary hot meals for such short duration flights - the fare structure did not permit such an extravagance and anyway, the time available for a meal service was too short.

But Indians want their hot meals, never mind the flight duration. And they want food without having to pay extra for it. After an overwhleming feedback urging the airline to re-introduce hot meals, a proposal is being prepared for consideration of the airline’s board of directors. This proposal seeks the board’s views on re-starting hot meal service on all flights regardless of their duration. The board will also decide whether food should come within the ticket price or whether passengers should be charged extra for it.

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Mind you, hot meals are a rarity even if passengers are ready to pay on LCC flights since many airlines do not want to carry ovens and other equipment on board. So some LCCs now offer heat and eat options such as having biryanis and pohas which need to sit in hot water for 5-8 minutes. As of now, Air India offers only biscuits on flights of less than an hour, heavy snacks on flights up 90 minutes and a full hot meal service for flights over two hours. Will Air India’s culinary gamble pay off? More to the point, will this move compel LCCs to also provide some complimentary food on board?

AI is already fighting in a fiercely competitive market by dropping fares on some routes below those charged by even AirAsia and other LCCs. Airline officials say barring two months, the domestic load factors (percentage of occupied seats on each aircraft) have been the highest in the industry and yields (revenue per passenger) have not suffered either. But the real test has been June, when AirAsia began offering dirt cheap fares and almost all other airlines were forced to match these. The load factor and yield for June may be affected for each airline, including Air India.

Meanwhile, AI officials say the airline will soon take 6 Airbus 320 aircraft on lease, to replace old aircraft, and deploy these in a single class configuration on non-metro routes. Again, this is a move to take on LCCs which also only offer single class seating on non-metro routes. The new aircraft will have 180 seats against 145 earlier.

Also, AI subsidiary Alliance Air will get 8 new ATR aircraft with 72 seats each - the outgoing fleet was a mix of 42-seater ATRs and CRJs. This again means capacity increase on select routes and the new fleet will be used to increase regional connectivity to small towns and airports