Newsmen Bureau

Kolkata, 14 August: BRITISH airline Virgin Atlantic has entered into a new code-share agreement with Jet Airways that will allow flyers from four Indian cities, including Kolkata, to fly on direct tickets on the Virgin Atlantic network.

Under the new move, on purchasing a direct ticket, flyers from Kolkata, Bengaluru, Chennai and Hyderabad will travel up to Delhi on a Jet Airways flight and then switch to the Virgin Atlantic flight bound for London Heathrow. The process will be same for incoming Virgin Atlantic flights from London Heathrow to India.

Virgin Atlantic operates a daily service between Delhi and London Heathrow on a Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner aircraft.

According to Virgin Atlantic officials, passengers purchasing the direct tickets will get all their boarding passes at their originating airport whether in India or the UK. Their check-in baggage will get automatically transferred from a Jet Airways flight to Virgin Atlantic and vise versa.

Nick Parker, the head of India and Middle East orations at Virgin Atlantic said that it was “really important” to them to be able to offer a convenient one-stop option allowing their customers to fly to wherever they want to travel.

Jet Airways’ chief commercial officer Raj Sivakumar said that they were pleased to offer enhanced and seamless connectivity to Virgin Atlantic flyers by offering seamless travel through the new expanded code-share arrangement.

Prior to this new development, Virgin Atlantic was operating a code-share with Jet Airways but that was limited to providing a connection between Mumbai and London.