Iconic Vistara airline touchdown in Colombo
India’s Vistara airline arrived in Sri Lanka last week on its inaugural flight commencing operations between Mumbai and Colombo with six flights a week.
The airline is unique in that it is a joint venture between Tata Sons (51 per cent) and Singapore Airlines (49 per cent) that started out in 2013 expanding its services to meet the growing demands of Indians wanting to travel by air.
Vistara Chief Strategy Officer Vinod Kannan said that Colombo is their 34th destination although when they initially started out they planned to make it their first international destination.
However, at the time they were unable to do so and in this respect began with their first flight to Singapore and today the airline has 200 daily flights with a fleet of 36 aircraft.
He noted that this is the only airline flying to Colombo that offers the unique feature of a Premium Economy class in addition to the Business Class and Economy Class.
The airline flies six times a week and is planning on increasing this to daily flights from next year and also intends to fly to Delhi as well.
North South Lines, a fully owned subsidiary of Hayleys is the airline’s representative in Sri Lanka and the company’s Chairman Mohan Pandithage outlined their history with the Tata group that resulted in this partnership that brought Visatara to Colombo.
The airline also flies to Dubai, UAE and Bangkok, Thailand and has flown around 4.5 million passengers and expects to expand its fleet size to almost double by the end of the current financial year ending March 2020.
The carrier expects to induct as many as 56 narrow-body and wide-body aircraft over the next four years, including 50 aircraft from the Airbus A320 neo family for domestic and international short and medium-haul operations and six Boeing B787-9 for long-haul international operations.