Air France-KLM Interested In Codeshare For IndiGo’s Overseas Flights

Air France-KLM is looking to work with IndiGo, the largest airline in India, for its international flights, following their codeshare arrangement last year. Air France-KLM is eager to include some of the budget airline’s short-haul international routes to the Middle East and Southeast Asia in the codeshare agreement.
According to a report, Air France-KLM wants to extend its codeshare agreement with low-cost carrier IndiGo to include sections of its international aircraft network. Many of IndiGo’s domestic routes are currently covered by its codeshare agreement with Air France-KLM.

The European airline consortium is eager to expand the collaboration to include Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal, three nations that border India. As a result, the airlines would be able to provide travelers with more options from their hubs in Paris and Amsterdam. Claude Sarre, GM (Indian subcontinent) for Air France-KLM, is quoted by TOI as saying,

“We entered into a domestic code share agreement with IndiGo for 30 places within India last summer. Now we are planning international code share with IndiGo for nearby countries like Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. This is subject to approvals and agreements.”

Together, Air France and KLM offer more than 40 weekly flights to India, stopping in Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Chennai, which are all major destinations. The firm has 22% more flights to India than it had last summer, and Hyderabad is also a possibility.
Air France-KLM and IndiGo signed a codeshare arrangement last summer to give them access to some of the Indian airline’s major domestic destinations, including Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Pune, and Hyderabad. This was done to take advantage of the developing Indian aviation market.

In order to compete with other European and Middle Eastern airlines for passengers in a market that is constantly expanding, Air France-KLM needs to have better access to more Indian cities. This is where the codeshare agreement with IndiGo comes into play. When the agreement will extend to IndiGo’s international locations is still to be determined.

Air France-KLM is attempting to expand into India in a number of ways, including through a codeshare with IndiGo. It was previously speculated that the airline group would also partner with Air India to purchase the government-owned MRO firm AI Engineering Services Limited (AIESL). Singapore Airlines, Lufthansa, and Air France-KLM are all eager to participate in the bidding process.

During the privatization of the airline, AIESL, which had previously been a division of Air India devoted to engineering, remained a government-owned company. A special purpose organization established in 2019 for keeping non-core assets and debt of Air India, Air India Assets keeping Ltd (AIAHL), actually retained ownership of a number of the airline’s subsidiaries.