By IANS
New Delhi : Spain is in advanced talks with Indian private carrier Kingfisher Airlines to make Madrid its European hub for onward flights to the US and South American destinations, an official said Thursday.
“We are in advanced talks with Kingfisher and hope to see progress,” Enrique Ruiz e Lera, director of the Spain Tourism Board for India, Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand, told IANS here.
“We had previously spoken to Jet Airways to make Madrid its European hub. Brussels offered them a better deal but we hope for better luck with Kingfisher,” the official added.
Based in Singapore, Ruiz e Lera is also the tourism counsellor of the Spanish embassy here. He is in India with a 19-member Spanish delegation for meetings and workshops with travel agents and tour operators to increase tourist inflows from this country.
The delegation participated in a “very successful” four-day workshop in Goa last month that some 88 Indian companies attended.
Some 50,000 Indian tourists currently visit Spain annually and the country hopes to see a 10 percent increase in this every year. Spain, a country of 43 million, received a staggering 58 million tourists in 2006, with the industry recording earnings of 48 billion euros.
“We have positioned ourselves as the gateway to South America, that has seen increasing outbound tourism to Spain,” Ruiz e Lera explained.
The initiative follows the re-negotiation of the India-Spain air services’ agreement in 2006 to provide for 49 two-way flights a week.
Jet Airways has announced it would soon introduce a flight to Madrid via Brussels. Currently, only Qatar Airways that operates 48 flights to and from India a week offers four Doha-Madrid connecting flights.
Other foreign airlines offer non-connecting flights to Madrid, Barcelona and other Spanish destinations from their European and British hubs.
Kingfisher has announced plans to expand its operations to the US by April 2008 with flights to San Francisco and has filed an application for this with the US Department of Transportation.
Under Indian norms, an airline needs to fly on domestic routes for a minimum of five years before it is permitted to fly abroad. Kingfisher, a two-year old airline, got around this requirement by acquiring for Rs.5.50 billion a 26 percent stake in pioneering low-cost carrier Air Deccan, which will complete five years of operations in 2008.
Kingfisher, the single largest shareholder in Air Deccan, has also made an open offer to acquire an additional 20 percent stake in the carrier, which has already re-branded its aircraft with the Kingfisher title and logo.
Kingfisher is India’s second largest private carrier after Jet Airways. It had created a storm at last year’s Paris Air Show by inking a deal for four Airbus A-380 super jumbos and becoming the first Indian airline to do so.