So farewell then Vistara. You were a good airline and the Indian aviation scene is poorer for your passing. We shall all miss you.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let me say that I don’t think Vistara was a great airline or a breakthrough of any kind. I find many of the tributes that followed its last flight on Monday mawkish and overdone. Perhaps this was because they came mostly from aviation geeks and nerds. And perhaps from people who love aeroplanes more than I do.
As somebody who has been taking at least two flights a week (perhaps more) for many decades, airlines are not necessarily objects of sentimentality for me. They are a fact of life.
Ask any frequent traveller and you’ll probably get the same response. We need airlines, but we don’t necessarily have to love them, especially when they are not very good.
Nevertheless, let’s admit that Vistara was better than many of its contemporaries. Its inflight service was generally much better than Air India’s though its ground handling could be a mess. It offered a comfortable ride but never reached the heights that Jet Airways had negotiated. And judged purely as a venture between one of the world’s best airlines, Singapore Airlines, and India’s most respected business group, the Tatas, it was curiously underwhelming.
In business terms, it lacked the innovative spark of IndiGo which came virtually out of nowhere (had you ever heard of Rahul Bhatia or Aditya Ghosh before?) and went on to become India’s top carrier, making it possible for lakhs of Indians who had never travelled by plane before to get used to air travel.
It should all have been much better for Vistara. On international routes, only a few Middle Eastern carriers like Emirates do a better job than Singapore Airlines. But Vistara never approached those standards. Perhaps the managers sent out by Singapore Airlines did not fully come to terms with running an airline in a large and diverse country like India, having got used to treating a single city as the hub.
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Perhaps they did not fully understand the Indian reality. One of Jet’s many key strengths was it spent money to do its own ground handling. Vistara, on the other hand, outsourced ground handling to a variety of operators all around India, many of whom did what was at best a mediocre job at such key airports as Mumbai. Nor was the Vistara management adventurous enough: it should’ve expanded more quickly on international routes.
In areas where Singapore Airlines excels – earning the loyalty of high yield premium passengers, for instance – it failed to make a significant dent. Many of its aircraft began to have smaller and smaller business class cabins in sharp contrast to Jet which remained the first choice of frequent premium passengers as long as it was around. Partly this is because it’s difficult to foster customer loyalty without good ground handling. Jet made it a point to pamper its top Jet Privilege passengers. Vistara was matter-of-fact.
To be sure, there were high spots. Many passengers are still nostalgic for the Vistara playlist, of the tunes that were played at takeoff and landing. The RetroJet which recalled the heyday of the JRD Tata-run Tata Airlines with a special livery and retro crew uniforms was a masterstroke. But all of this disappeared fairly early in Vistara’s short existence. By the end the Vistara experience was just mechanical.
Every time I spoke to somebody at the Tatas about how underwhelming Vistara was given how much it had going for it, I was told that the Tatas had left it all to Singapore Airlines. In retrospect, this may have been a mistake. The Tatas lacked Singapore’s experience with aircraft operations, but they understood Indian hospitality: just look at the Taj group.
For all that, I enjoyed many of the flights I took with Vistara. My last flight from Male to Delhi a few days ago had an excellent, experienced cabin crew. Airline food is never great but Vistara’s meals were far better than the average airline meal. I never quite worked out how even though Air India and Vistara used the same flight kitchens Vistara’s food was so much better.
So, what happens now? Frankly, I am not sure that airline mergers are always a good idea. The Air India-Indian Airlines merger badly damaged both airlines and Air India never again reached the standards it had maintained before the merger.
This time the danger is greater because two years after taking over Air India, the Tata are still struggling. Each day brings with it a new series of complaints and the Tatas offer only one of two excuses again and again. It is either “things will get better when we have new planes” or “you know, we have too many employees with the PSU mindset.”
Both have a limited shelf life. Yes, there is a problem with the aircraft. They were very badly maintained by the government-run Air India and the problems are not easy to fix. For instance it is hard to find spare parts for seats that are no longer being manufactured.
But the problems with the aircraft are just one part of the complaints we see every day from angry passengers on social media. The rest are attributable to straightforward management failures.
As for the ‘PSU mindset of employees’, that is beginning to wear a little thin now. The Tatas have brought in several senior managers and got rid of many of the old ones. Two years later if they’re still handicapped by the attitudes of old employees (which I really don’t believe) then that’s also a management failure. They knew what they were buying. They should have taken the so-called mindsets into account.
I know how committed the Tatas are to Air India. It wasn’t just Ratan Tata. Even N Chandrasekharan, the chairman of Tatas, is said to be deeply committed to the turnaround of Air India. So I hope he will pay a little more attention to its working and will encourage Air India executives to get out of their offices and to spend more time at the airports and with passengers.
It won’t be easy to merge the two airlines while the Tatas are still turning Air India around. But it is by no means impossible if the group puts its mind to it. They can learn from the mistakes that bankrupted Jet Airways and the failures that prevented Vistara from reaching its full potential.
As somebody who takes over a hundred flights a year, most of them on Tata owned airlines, I do hope they get it right. There is simply too much at stake for both the Tatas and for Indian aviation.
