Jet Airways unveils master brand plan

I didn't say that. Jet Airways did! And here's proof.


Close on the heels (in fact, just a few hours later the same day) of Tata-SIA announcing the brand name of their new airline - Vistara - Jet Airways held a press conference where they announced a lot of things. Lately, no press conference of Jet is complete without James Hogan having to make a few (or many) points, and this one was no different.

The upshot of all of this is that Jet Airways finally realised that they were complicating their brand identities. After acquiring Air Sahara a few years back, they effectively ran different brands - Jet Airways, the full service brand, and JetKonnect / JetLite, their low-cost brand. They had JetKonnect as the no-frills offering, since that's what the Indian market seemed to be burgeoning with! They then further confused the market by adding Jet Airways flight codes on some Jetlite flights and vice-versa, since technically JetLite was a codeshare partner.

Then a few days back, there was also a rumour that Jet was planning to sell off JetLite, which Jet clarified publicly as not true:


So finally, moving past all that, here's the plan (or the master plan, as they like to call it):

They will now have a single master brand offering across ... domestic network covering Jet Airways and its subsidiary Jet Konnect to revitalise our product and service. 

Here's what another announcement from Jet says:

Over the coming months, you will see Jet Airways as a single brand reflected across our entire business, in the aircraft livery, staff uniforms, cabin interiors, product and service offering and our frequent flyer programme JetPrivilege. The Jet Airways master brand will cover the whole fleet and all our aircraft will be progressively repainted in the Jet Airways livery over the coming months.

Also according to Jet, the key highlights of the new plan will include:
  • A full service Premiere product will be implemented across all operations to ensure a premium experience on the ground and in the air. 
  • Domestic Economy Class members will be provided a meal service offering value with competitive fares.
  • The enhanced domestic offering will provide a quality product with exclusive value adds, including premium seating, lounge passes and higher baggage allowances than competitors.  JetPrivilege which has recently announced an enhanced accrual and redemption structure, will provide more benefits and privileges for our frequent flyers. In addition to the minimum 500 JPMiles per flight, members will also gain tier and recognition benefits and be able to redeem JPMiles on flights operated by Jet Airways and Etihad Airways. 
  • Reciprocal frequent flyer rewards and recognition in partnership with Etihad Guest.

My take from this is as follows:
  • All aircraft will now have the same branding
  • Virtually all sectors will have business class (Premiere) seating - likely between 8 and 16 seats per aircraft
  • All sectors will have meal service, which is good, but because they are effectively giving up the ability to earn some revenue on food service (which by all accounts wasn't much to begin with), this might affect pricing
  • I'm a bit cagey about the "exclusive value adds" - exclusive to what? Are they looking to charge for some of these? That would be highly unusual for a full-service airline
  • For airports such as Delhi where low-cost carriers use terminal 1 and the full-service ones (non-International) use terminal 3, this could result in a higher ticket price, due to UDF that is paid to the airport operator.
  • Overall, for some of the reasons I've mentioned above, I see ticket prices increasing to some extent.

So, after all of this plus Tata-SIA's Vistara, is there a renewal of interest in full-service airlines, moving away from the low-cost frenzy that's captured the country for the last decade or so?


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