Vande Bharat Mission, Phase 3: Air India to offer more seats after surge in demand for tickets

As part of the Centre's programme, the airline will operate around 300 flights to Europe, Australia, Canada, the USA, the UK and Africa between June 10 and July 1 under the third phase.

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Nairobi-Mumbai-Delhi Air India repatriation flight took off from Nairobi, bringing home 234 stranded Indians. (Twitter/Air India)

Due to an “overwhelming” response, Air India Saturday said it would offer more seats on its flights under the third phase of the Centre’s Vande Bharat Mission. The announcement came a day after the national carrier opened bookings for 300 flights from select destinations, including the US and the UK, between June 10 and July 1.

Between 5 pm Friday and 8 am Saturday, the airline company experienced “6-7 times more activity” on its website, and over 22,000 seats were sold.

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“Demand for seats from India on flights planned under Mission Vande Bharat-3 is overwhelming. Sectors/ Flights are being opened in systematic manner for booking, on the website,” the company tweeted. “Sale of tickets commenced at 5 pm yesterday for select destinations in USA, Canada, UK & Europe under Phase3 of #VBM. Our website experienced 6-7 times more activity & over 22000 seats have been sold overall till 8 am. More seats to more destinations will be added in due course.”

#FlyAI: sale of tickets commenced at 5pm yesterday for select destinations in USA,Canada,UK & Europe under Phase3 of #VBM. Our website experienced 6-7 times more activity & over 22000 seats hv been sold overall till 8am. More seats to more destinations will be added in due course

— Air India (@airindiain) June 6, 2020

The airline also reported six crore hits on its website during the first two hours of opening the bookings, news agency PTI reported.

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As part of the Centre’s repatriation programme, the airline will operate around 300 flights to Europe, Australia, Canada, the USA, the UK and Africa.

At 8.20 pm on Friday, it tweeted: “Bookings for select destinations in USA, Canada,UK and Europe etc under Phase3 of #MissionVandeBharat opened at 5 pm today. Around 60 million hits received till 7pm on our website & 1700 seats sold through the website alone in 2 hrs. Bookings continue and tickets are being issued.”

However, due to the rush, several travellers vented their ire on social media and complained of glitches on the site.

A passenger named Vicky Ravi tweeted, “I’ve been trying to book flights for the last one hour, ur website crashed. Please kindly help me with the booking”.

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Another passenger named Mandeep Kaur said the website is “very slow and the system is crashing”.

Amid the gradual ease in restrictions along with resumption of domestic commercial passenger flights on May 25, Union Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri had said that the ministry is trying to start some percentage of international passenger flights before August.

Also read | Ticket prices set by Air India for flights under Vande Bharat Mission are reasonable: Puri

“I can’t put a date on it (restarting international flights). But if somebody says can it be done by August or September, my response is why not earlier depending on what is the situation,” he had earlier said.

Under the Vande Bharat Mission, Air India and its subsidiary Air India Express started operating international flights from May 7 onwards to repatriate stranded Indians from abroad. The first phase was from May 7 to May 16, following which the second phase began.

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Between May 7 and June 1, Air India group has operated a total 423 inbound international flights under the mission, bringing 58,867 Indian citizens back to the country.

(With inputs from PTI)