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Jet Airways is introducing a slew of new flight offerings. Whilst most of these are extra flights on existing routes, their newest offering is on the BOM-CDG route, on an A330 aircraft, which is proposed to start operations from May 15, 2014. As of now it appears to be a daily service - 9W 123 will leave BOM at 12:00 noon, and reach CDG at 17:50 hrs; and on the return, departure is scheduled at 21:10 hrs to reach BOM at 09:45 hrs (next day). This will be a 2 class service flight, with no first class offering. Here's the basic flight info: This may well be one step of a closer alignment, to the proposed move of Jet's European hub from Brussels to Amsterdam, that Jet announced some time in May 2013. Fares Return fares ex-India are in the region of: Rs 45k for BOM-CDG return (cheapest economy class bucket) Rs 60k for most metros in India to CDG via BOM (cheapest economy class bucket) Rs 180k for BOM-CDG return (Premiere/business class) Rs 210k for most metros in India to CDG via B...

In December 2013, I had to rush to Gurgaon on an urgent business trip. Unfortunately (and strangely), virtually all hotels were sold out for the first night of my stay. I finally managed to find some contacts who got me a room at the Hilton Garden Inn for the first night, and the DoubleTree by Hilton on the second. I was quite satisfied with this arrangement, because I quite like the DoubleTree , because they said they'd have my luggage transferred from one hotel to another during the day, and because that would count as 2 stays. However, once I checked in at the Hilton Garden Inn, it was clear that I like the hotel well enough to stay for both nights, and also get a small haul of points with Hilton More Nights More Points (up to 4x) offer , which BTW is valid for stays till 31 January 2014. And so I got my stay extended by a day. The Hilton Garden Inn, Gurgaon is located at Baani Square, which is also the mall next door. That said, the hotel had its own entrance, which ensured a l...

Garry Kenneth Toomey, CEO of Jet Airways for barely seven months, has resigned, effective immediately . Clearly, this seems to be the result of the advanced stages of the Etihad-Jet deal. The only question is, did he really resign, or was his hand forced? In other news, Mumbai's new international terminal was inaugurated recently, but its operational launch has been deferred to 12 February 2014. I won't write more about this, and you can read AJ's post on this , on Live From A Lounge. But here are some statistics about this new terminal, which will hopefully integrate the domestic operations in early 2015: Increase in passenger handling capacity from 32 million to 40 million annually Increase in aircraft parking stands to more than 100 The Mithi river runs beneath the rebuilt runway It has 188 check-in counters, 72 arrival immigration desks (up from 40), 60 departure immigration desks (up from 38), 52 boarding gates (up from 20), 10,900 seats, 161 elevators, escalators and...

Move over FlightAware and the likes of you!!! Just kidding of course, but that may well be partially true, now that Air India has launched its own version of a flight tracker, to provide real time flight status update along with a visual (map) interface to show the current location of the flight. You can access this on AI's home page, under Travel Info, [updated] or just click here . This opens up a new window, with a base map and an input field for the flight number: Hit "Search" and that's about it. Here are a couple of results - both of which seemed to be correct at the appropriate time. One was for a completed flight, and the other was in-progress. However, when I cross-checked the second one with the results from Google, there we some differences, but I could live with those. Conclusion To my mind, this is a significant upping of its technology standards by Air India. What's of note, is that information availability by AI is increasing, which is very unusual...

Hilton is running a flash sale in APAC, which offers 50% off on select properties in Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, for stays up until 31 March 2014 , as long as you book it before 16 January 2014 . So if you're planning something there before the end of March, you could well make good use of this offer. Click on the link below for the offer (FYI, this is an affiliate link, so I will receive a small commission if you do use this link. Thank you). 72-Hour Hilton Flash Sale! 50% off hotel stays in Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand! Sale runs from January 14 - 16, 2014. The offer gives you 50% discount off the Best Flexible rate and is prepaid, non-refundable and non-cancellable. To my mind, this is a very good sale, since it is quite rare that you'd be able to score such great rates at some of these properties (Conrad Bangkok and Hilton Pattaya come to mind readily). Properties included and INR rates are as below (click for larger image). Here are the full T&Cs: Offer vali...

[Update 2015/16: This hotel is no longer the Pullman, but has been converted into the Le Meridien SPG hotel. A new Pullman hotel is coming up at Aerocity, New Delhi.] I'm someone who is usually reasonably liberal when it comes to hotel and airline reviews. The main reason for that is that even if the experience was rather bad, I like to think that maybe they were having bad luck. However, when things tend to go consistently wrong or off-putting, it strikes a very discordant note, and leaves me with an overall rather bad taste in the mouth. My stay at the Pullman Central Park, Gurgaon, a few weeks back, was one of those bad ones, though there were one or two elements that I did like about the stay. I'd flown into DEL rather late in the evening, and so it was well past 9 pm that I checked into the hotel. I was carrying a reasonably heavy bag, and the first thing that struck me (apart from a rather rude cabbie) was that there was no bell desk person at the entrance to help with th...