Air India has increased its offering on its Dubai flights from Delhi and Mumbai. The move comes as part of a network aligning process between Air India and Air India Express.
What this will mean is passengers coming from Dubai or heading to Dubai will be able to connect more effortlessly to and from domestic flights in India through the airline’s two largest hubs.
Service increases
From April 29th, Air India will increase its Dubai services to 5x daily between Delhi and Dubai and as for Mumbai to Dubai, services have increased to 3x daily.
This means a total of 8 daily flights will run between the two Indian cities and Dubai each day throughout the upcoming summer season.
In order to have the most efficient operation flight times are spread out across the day, to help with the network aligning process between the mainline brand and the express brand that is currently underway.
The move to increase flights is also a result of increased demand for the route, with Air India now deploying its 787-8 Dreamliner on 5 of these 8 flights between Delhi and Mumbai to Dubai.
These 787s are in a 2 class configuration, with 18 fully lie flat seats in business class and 238 economy seats, so any demand for business travel is well catered for.
As for the rest of the flights, these will be operated by Airbus A320 and A321 aircraft, as they have been in the past.
The schedule
Although flight times are said to be spread across the day, they are mostly concentrated into peak flying times during the day, with 2 early morning flights and 3 late afternoon/evening flights for the Delhi route.
The same can be said about the Mumbai route which sees 1 early morning flight and 2 late afternoon/evening flights.
It is worth noting this basic schedule is based off of the departure time from India, as due to time zones, the reciprocating schedule leaving Dubai is different, as far as departure times are concerned.
Below is the flight schedule for flights leaving India:
Delhi-Dubai:
- AI929 (Dep. 06:40am local – 787)
- AI917 (Dep. 09:50am local)
- AI915 (Dep. 16:45pm local – 787)
- AI947 (Dep. 19:10pm local)
- AI995 (Dep. 20:30pm local – 787)
Mumbai-Dubai:
- AI909 (Dep 08:25am local – 787)
- AI919 (Dep 16:10pm local)
- AI983 (Dep 20:30pm local – 787)
As you can see from above the airline has well placed its Boeing 787s on the routes, having evenly distributed them across the day, to capture the most demand and yield the most for the airline.
The airline has also made it clear that these flight departure times may vary slightly each day of the week, which isn’t uncommon with flights around the world in general.
All told, with this increase in flights on both routes, it shows demand for the flights to Dubai from India have increased signifcantly recently to warrant the frequency increase.
With Air India’s combined 51 weekly flights plus Emirates’, Indigo’s, Corendon’s, SpiceJet’s, Fly Dubai’s and Vistara’s combined frequencies, flight numbers sit comfortably in the 200s, for Mumbai and Delhi’s combined frequencies to Dubai.
