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Air India Racing Against Time to Join Star Alliance

May 11, 2011 at 2:32 PM | by | Comments (0)

Air India has been given a hard deadline of July 31st to finally meet the entry requirements for Star Alliance, something the Mumbai-based airline has been trying to do since they got an invitation to join Star in 2007. The airline needs to standardize its operations and computers with the rest of the alliance, so that happy alliancey things like code sharing, seat upgrading, and reward traveling can start happening.

Integration has proven to be something of a problem, and Air India has already requested and received three deadline extensions. We're guessing that a fourth extension won't be forthcoming, given Star Alliance CEO Jaan Albrecht's subtle hint that "we will not extend this deadline anymore."

To get a sense for the airline's situation you need only flip over to the other Air India story from this morning, pointedly titled "Air India passengers continue to complain of chaos." It's specifically about the ongoing logistical trainwrecks caused by the just-ended Air India pilot strike. The walkout lasted 10 days, it was ugly, and it led to over 1,000 flight cancellations. The recovery process is ongoing, the airline is nowhere near catching up, and now the pilots union is demanding a government investigation. So while "chaos" is definitely the right word, that headline could apply to any number of Air India's issues.

Surprisingly, it's still possible that the airline could meet the summer deadline. They've very noticeably gone a long way in changing their ticketing system, which was giving them all kinds of standardization problems. Since airline alliances make it easier to get places, and since India travel is kind of awesome, let's keep our fingers crossed.

[Photo: Senthil mls / Wiki Commons]

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