Looks like Amsterdam will be Jet Airways' new European hub, plus a 2x/3x JP miles promo to YYZ

There was enough media speculation a couple of months back about Jet Airways having issues with continuing its scissors hub operations in Brussels. The add-on to this was a potential move to another European hub, possibly Amsterdam.

Jet Airways has now pretty much confirmed this, with its announcement to start daily non-stop scheduled services from India to Amsterdam starting 27 March 2016. The Brussels-based network of Jet will come to an end on 26 March 2016, although the currently published flight schedules go up to June 2016 in some cases (probably an error that'll be rectified soon).

Jet will operate Airbus A333 services on BOM-AMS, DEL-AMS and AMS-YYZ as follows, each of these configured with 34 business class and 259 economy class seats. No first class.

9W 232	Mumbai	Amsterdam	02:25	08:15	A330-300	Daily
9W 231	Amsterdam	Mumbai	11:20	23:55	A330-300	Daily
9W 234	Delhi	Amsterdam	02:35	08:00	A330-300	Daily
9W 234	Amsterdam	Toronto	11:20	13:40	A330-300	Daily
9W 233	Amsterdam	Delhi	11:40	23:20	A330-300	Daily
9W 233	Toronto	Amsterdam	19:50	09:15 + 1	A330-300	Daily

Given the scissors-hub model that Jet operates, this schedule, as with the one via Brussels, will allow passengers from BOM and DEL to connect at AMS and proceed onwards to YYZ. 

Jet Airways has also announced a new strategic partnership with KLM and Delta. While not much is known currently about the details of this partnership, what is known is that the partnership covers:

• the entire network of KLM, and
• select codeshare flights of Delta.

The operations through BRU have been Jet Airways' focal point since 2007 when the US and Canada flights were launched. At one time, they had flights to BRU from DEL, BOM, MAA and BLR, and I've myself on the BOM-BRU and MAA-BRU sectors at the time. The timings used to be quite convenient, though I don't see much of that having changed in the new schedule.

Here are my thoughts as to some of the key reasons for this significant change:

• BRU as an airport is waning, as are Brussels Airlines' services. Therefore, there isn't much of benefit for Jet Airways, feeding traffic into Brussels. Also, Brussels Airlines is a Star Alliance partner, and therefore may not be the best airline partner for Jet, particularly after...
• ...JEtihad, where Etihad likely sees itself benefiting more from AMS over BRU. After all, AUH itself is used by Jet as a hub to connect to the US, so AMS may be more oriented to Canada and Europe. Plus KLM is a far stronger player in Europe, compared to Brussels Airlines, and the partnership with Delta doesn't dilute any value either.
• ex-AMS offers more options into India than ex-BRU. This will also significantly help India-inbound traffic from Europe and the US, or connecting via AMS in general.

In all, this is a good change, in my view, since KLM offers more options intra-Europe, and Delta will be able to provide better connections to the US.

From a redemption perspective, both BOM-AMS and DEL-AMS are available for redemption, at 42,500 miles one-way in economy class, and 82,500 miles in business. Unfortunately, BOM-AMS consistently shows only one business class seat available for many dates.

And DEL-AMS shows only two available seats in business class, generally.

So if you have ideas about redeeming JP miles on these flights, you may want to act quickly. However, I think this is a pretty poor use of miles, and I say that because I've had some recent thoughts on using JP miles. I'll be writing about that soon, so stay tuned.

Delhi-Toronto 2x/3x JP miles promotion

On a sort-of related note, Jet Airways is also running a 2x/3x promotion on its Delhi-Toronto sector for tickets booked and flown till 31 March 2016. Business class (Premiere) bookings earn 3x base miles (that's a 2x bonus) and Economy class bookings earn 2x base miles (1x bonus). This applies to both onward and return flights.

What are your thoughts on Amsterdam as Jet Airways' new European hub?