International Flights Latest Updates: As the year 2020 is coming to an end in few days, Air India on Tuesday announced that it will start new services to the US from January in 2021. Issuing a statement, the airline stated that the first-ever non-stop services between Bengaluru and San Francisco as well as between Hyderabad and Chicago will start from January 9 and 13 next year, respectively.
“Passengers from Bengaluru and Hyderabad – both gateways to South India – will enjoy huge benefits traveling to San Francisco and Chicago as this will enable faster and easier connections,” the airline said in a statement.
Notably, Air India at present operates non-stop flights from Delhi to New York, Newark, Washington, San Francisco, and Chicago and from Mumbai to Newark.
With the announcement of the plans, Air India has put in competition with United and American, who plan to fly similar routes next year.
While this year has mostly seen reductions in Air India’s schedule, the new plan is expected to grow the traffic. The two new routes are strategic choices by Air India, tapping into new markets and beating out the competition.
With no direct flights to any US city, including New York, the Hyderabad-Chicago is a notably unserved market. This makes a direct route a lucrative one for Air India, allowing it to carry much of the US-bound traffic from the city. On the other hand, Chicago is also home to the second-largest Indian-American community in the country, making it a strong VFR (visiting family and relatives) destination.
Secondly, Bangalore-San Francisco is another high-yield market that does not have direct flights. Hence, this service of Air India in this route will focus on business travel (with both cities being major IT hubs) and leisure and VFR travel.
Mean-while, India recorded 20,549 coronaviruses (Covid-19) cases and 286 related deaths in the last 24 hours which pushed the overall tally and death toll to 10,224,852 and 148,439, according to the Union health ministry’s dashboard on Wednesday. Today’s count is higher than that of yesterday by 25 percent (4,117). However, the total active cases have further dropped to 262,272 and the recovery rate is nearing 96 percent with over 9.83 million people discharged/cured till now, according to a health ministry update at 8 am.
For the past three months, India has been seeing a downward trend in its daily coronavirus tally with an average of 22,000 cases added daily in the week ending December 27. The current numbers are far less than that of September when nearly 92,000 cases were being added in a span of 24 hours. Ten states and Union Territories (UTs) are contributing over 78 percent of the new cases, the health ministry said adding that Kerala, Maharashtra and Chattisgarh added the most number of cases.
