By Rudy Santos
April 1, 2011, 12:00 AM
NEW DELHI – Flag carrier Philippine Airlines (PAL) inaugurated its regular service here last Wednesday, linking the country with India’s capital, by flying non-stop in six and a half hours and touching down at the Indira Gandhi International Airport at 2:30 a.m. with more than 200 passengers onboard.
Key government and PAL officials, led by PAL chairman Lucio C. Tan were welcomed by India’s tourism officials, businessmen, investors, travel and tourism officials.
Vivienne K. Tan, PAL executive vice president-commercial group, said the launch of the Manila-New Delhi route “is in step with the government’s program to perk up the economy by bringing in more tourists and serves as a vital air link between our two countries.”
Jaime Bautista, PAL president and CEO, said: “PAL is flying to an India that… has emerged in recent years as one of the world’s economic powerhouses, with GDP growth of close to nine percent this financial year. India’s $1.4-trillion economy is now the third largest in Asia and 11th largest in the world.”
He said the booming economy has spawned a high-spending middle class of 350 million consumers that’s growing by 20 million people every year, for whom travel is a major aspiration. In 2009, about eight million Indians traveled abroad and two million of them headed to Southeast Asia.
However, Bautista noted that only a trickle, 32,817 Indians, visited the Philippines, far behind corresponding figures for Singapore (726,000), Thailand (611,983), Malaysia (589,838) and Indonesia (150,000).
He said PAL will aim to accelerate this traffic stream by making available over 188,000 airline seats a year for Indian travelers to and from the Philippines. He added that these travelers now enjoy the convenience of having their travel time greatly reduced from the previous 10 to 30 hours via a third-country connection to just six and a half hours with direct PAL flights.
PAL flew to Calcutta 57 years ago for refueling stop on the way to Rome, Paris and London using a propeller-driven DC-4. The whole trip took 30 hours.
To complement the direct Delhi-Manila service three times weekly, Bautista said PAL has added another three weekly flights routed via Bangkok. This gives the traveler a wider choice of itineraries for the three cities covered by the PAL service.
“Going the other way, our new service also aims to increase Filipino visitors to India. The Indian government has made our job much easier when it adopted, earlier this year, a visa-on-arrival policy for Filipinos.”
With all of the incentives now in place – visa-on-arrival, combined with PAL’s six flights weekly and greater promotional efforts in the Philippine market – expect a boom in Filipino visitor arrivals in India, Bautista added.
As bonus, he said that PAL’s new service is also expected to boost business travel between the two countries, particularly in the rapidly growing information technology sector.
PAL is allocating 188,000 seats a year on the Indian route, in keeping with the provisions of the 2005 RP-Indian air services agreement that also allows PAL to fly seven times a week from any point in the Philippines to Mumbai, Calcutta and Chennai (formerly Madras).
PAL’s return to India coincides with the carrier’s 70th anniversary and underscores the storied past of Asia’s first airline.
The flag carrier first flew to the subcontinent on May 3, 1947 when it stopped in the cities of Calcutta and Karachi on a pioneering DC-4 service from Manila to Rome, Madrid and London, making PAL the first Southeast Asian airline to fly to Europe.
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