India's largest international airline Jet Airways today entered into code share agreements with American carrier Delta Airlines and UK-based Virgin Atlantic to expand connectivity to 24 new western cities via London Heathrow.
"Effective November 2, Jet customers flying to North America will be able to connect through London Heathrow onto 9 US destinations operated by Delta," Jet said in a release.
The Naresh Goyal-led airline said the new destinations in the US are Atlanta, Boston, Detroit, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Portland, Salt Lake City and Seattle.
In turn, Delta and Virgin Atlantic customers flying from North America to India will be able to connect with Delta codeshare onto Jet to Mumbai and New Delhi through the Heathrow and onward to 20 destinations within India.
The new Delta codeshare destinations include Ahmedabad, Amritsar, Bangalore, Kozhikode, Chennai, Kochi, Coimbatore, Goa, Hyderabad, Indore, Jaipur, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mangalore, Pune, Thiruvananthapuram and Vadodara, Jet said.
The new routes complement Delta and Jet destinations available through existing codeshare agreements via Amsterdam's Schiphol airport and the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris.
Jet Whole-time Director Gaurang Shetty said, "This expanded cooperation over the Heathrow now allows us to offer our guests flying to North America and multi-gateway connectivity over all of our European destinations.
"The codeshare arrangement with Delta will enable our guests to connect to 24 cities across the US via London, Paris and Amsterdam. Further, our loyalty programme partnership will also enable the frequent flyers of both the carriers to accrue and redeem their flying miles across each other's entire network," he said.
For the largest American airline Delta, this is the first time that its passengers would get an opportunity to fly to India via London with a single ticket.
"With up to 11,000 people flying daily between India and North America, and with trade and tourism increasing between the US, Britain and India, we are giving our customers a more versatile schedule on this sector," said Nat Pieper, Senior VP for Europe, Middle East, Africa and India at Delta.
Subject to government approvals, Virgin Atlantic will expand its existing codeshare with Jet's flights to 10 Indian cities from Heathrow and also to many US destinations like Miami, Newark, San Francisco and Washington, from early 2017.
Virgin Atlantic already operates codeshare with Jet on flights between five Indian cities and Heathrow via New Delhi.
Jet operates to Southeast Asia, South Asia, West Asia, Europe and North America directly and to many destinations through codeshare with Airberlin, Air Serbia, Air Seychelles, Alitalia, Etihad, Darwin Airline and Niki.
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