Jet Airways to fly to Ho Chi Minh City in Nov 2014 - and calls on 5th freedom rights

From 5 November 2014, Jet Airways will fly to Ho Chi Minh City (formerly, Saigon) in Vietnam. While Hanoi is the capital of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City is the largest city in that country. Vietnam is also increasingly becoming a new favourite among Indian travellers to South East Asia, which may explain why Jet is launching this route.


As an inaugural promotion, Jet is offering economy class tickets on DEL-SGN starting Rs 37,463. This flight will be an extension of the DEL-BKK flight that Jet currently runs as follows:

9W64 DEL 1230 hrs BKK 1825 hrs
9W63 BKK 0840 hrs DEL 1130 hrs.

The new schedule means that these flights will leave DEL earlier, and will stopover at BKK before proceeding to SGN, and similarly on the return segment. Here is the proposed schedule.


As stopovers go:

  • 9W64 from DEL will reach BKK at 1535 hrs and leave for SGN at 1645 hrs. 
  • 9W63 from SGN will reach BKK at 1945 hrs and leave BKK for DEL at 2045 hrs. 

The revision in flight schedules seems to have been done to also accommodate traffic coming in from BOM to BKK, that can connect to SGN on 9W64 after a layover. Same goes for the return leg.

At this point in time, it is not possible to book award tickets using miles, on DEL-SGN-DEL sectors.

It should be noted that this flight is under the 5th freedom of air transport, which allows an airline to carry revenue traffic between foreign countries as a part of services connecting the airline's own country. So it allows an airline to carry passengers from country 1 to country 2, and then from country 2 to country 3, and so on, as part of the overall service from country 1 to country 3 (or whatever). So in this case, you can actually book tickets on the BKK-SGN sector, and it retails for about 4,800 THB for a return economy ticket, on a random date I selected in December 2014.


There's another possible angle here, which is the Etihad one. There are just 3 direct flights on the AUH-BKK segment, 

Source: Google

and only one that flies AUH-SGN. 

Source: Google

This new DEL-SGN schedule could well be a feeder for ex-AUH passengers to BKK and SGN. After all, Etihad is clearly looking to expand into SE Asia, and this is just another opportunity. However, Etihad's flights from AUH to DEL at this point are not timed well enough to be a feeder on 9W64, so if this is indeed the gameplan, then you can expect some changes to flight times on the AUH-DEL sector.


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