New routes from London
The 1st airline to start operations in India through crowd-funding, People Over Profit (POP) wants to fly a direct route that isn’t served by any other LCC. But will it see the light of day?
There’s a new low-cost, long-haul airline in the making and it wants to launch a direct route not served by any other airline out of London: non-stop flights from the UK to Amritsar and Ahmedabad. The only hitch is that before it gets its operating licenses, it needs to sell Gold Passes via crowd-funding. Nino (Navdip) Singh Judge, Chairman and Principal, POP (People Over Profit), says, “We are currently pushing the £500 Gold Passes which come with a free ticket and eight VIP benefits worth £500 every time they travel for the next five years. Oh, and money-back guarantee if we don’t fly!” POP requires £5 million to launch the airline’s first-year operation.
Interesting proposition, but will it work? Judge is upbeat. He says, “POP is different – it is going to be a UK airline who’s DNA is Indian. The Punjabi and Gujarati communities both in the UK and India historically have had strong family and business connections and that desire for both communities to keep in touch and visit each other has not abated over the years. There are vast numbers of potential passengers waiting for an airline like POP.” The airline aims to cater to the business sector as well as the VFR and leisure tourism markets and has planned three flights a week to Ahmedabad and three per week to Amritsar. It plans to sell through its website and a handful of travel agents including TravelPack.
Currently, flights between the UK and India are between London Heathrow and just two cities, Mumbai and Delhi, and three supporting ones, Bengaluru, Chennai and Hyderabad. This ignores the secondary cities of India. POP will no doubt benefit from the new Civil Aviation Policy that makes provisions to boost regional connectivity in India.
POP’s business model will donate 51 per cent of its profits to charities in the communities that it serves. To this, Judge says, “LCCs have the best profit margins. 51 per cent of net profits will go to charity after re-investment into business.” He hopes that the first POP flight will depart from Stansted Airport this year in Q4 (2016) beginning to Amritsar using a 378 seat all-economy Airbus A330-300 aircraft in POP livery. “We plan to introduce more routes between the UK and India like Kolkata, Lucknow, Panaji/Mangalore, Surat/Pune and Bhubaneswar (Odisha) (presuming upgrading as international airports); also Sylhet (Bangladesh),” he adds. POP plans to have offices in Amritsar but its India headquarters is not yet finalised.