Saloni Bhatia – New Delhi
Jet Airways is expected to launch daily flights from Delhi and Mumbai to Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. Apart from raising Holland’s profile on the Indian outbound market, this would also add another stopover option to people travelling to Toronto, Canada. The airline would use an Airbus A330- 300 for these routes, with 34 seats in premier class and 259 seats in economy class. A recent press conference was held in New Delhi to announce the launch. Aplhonsus Stoelinga, ambassador of Netherlands to India; Jos Vranken, managing director, NBTC; Wilco Sweijen., director aviation marketing, Amsterdam Airport Schiopol and Gaurang Shetty, director, Jet Airways were present at the event.
Speaking to Express TravelWorld, Vranken, shared, “With these newly introduced direct flights from Jet Airways, we are confident Holland will capitalise on the enormous potential of the India market helping us achieve 16 million global visitors by 2020. The projected 26 per cent growth rate would put India as a top destination for inbound travel. Currently two-third of the traffic is transit passengers, but we are focusing on promoting our country as the ‘Holland City’. This will provide Indian visitors year around, easy to discover reasons to travel be it shopping, culture, cycling or natural beauty.”
Talking about the collaboration, Sweijan added, “India has always been a very important market for Netherlands. In terms of capacity and flights, this collaboration would bring us more passengers from the India market. This would not only help increase business traffic but will also give better opportunity for leisure travel. The airport is under one roof which provides smooth passage for transit travellers which contributes almost 40 per cent out of our 58 million passengers. We wish to connect Schiphol to the rest of the world and this brings us one step closer to our goal.”
Shetty elaborated on the shift from Brussels airport to Schiphol in Amsterdam, he said, “Commercially Amsterdam is a better proposition and this route connecting India to North America and Canada would provide people with another option.”