Delhi, this is Houston: come, fly to us

Fourth largest US city competes with Dallas as ‘natural’ destination for A-I

Houston, the fourth largest US city after New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, has launched an intense lobbying campaign to get Air India to include the city as a flight destination. It has also initiated talks with Jet Airways.

The Houston Airport has already sent two high level delegationsthe last one three weeks agoto meet top officials in the Ministry of Civil Aviation and Air India at Mumbai and New Delhi, urging them to ‘‘consider’’ the city as their next destination.

It is now in the process of sending another official delegation, before dispatching a high-level team including political leaders, members from the industry and business and influential Indo-American community leaders in September.

Its officials also held preliminary talks with few other private air carriers like Jet Airways to consider Houston as one of their destinations whenever they decide to launch services in southern parts of the US. Aviation experts have termed the development as an indication of emergence of India as an economic power and the fact that the country was now considered one with maximum growth potential for air passengers.

With word going around that Air India now wants to expand its service of operations to southern parts of the United States, the Houston Airport has formally urged the Indian carrier to launch four-days-a-week Mumbai-Paris-Houston flights.

‘‘Houston is the largest city in the US not served by Air India, despite that the region has one of the largest concentrations of Indians in the US,’’ Richard Vacar, Director, Houston Airports System, told The Indian Express.

‘‘Houston has the largest concentration of Asian Indians in Texas. It is the location of one of the five Government of India Consular Offices in the US. So, the city deserves to have a direct connecting flight from India,’’ he said.

Conceding that Dallas Airport too was in the race for the Air India flight and was offering several concessions, Vacar argued that the Houston-Paris-Mumbai route would ‘generate’ the largest net new revenue to Air India estimated to be $70 million (about Rs 310 crore): nearly $13 million (over Rs 55 crore) than would be generated on the same routing from Dallas.

Luis Perez, Vice-President, Houston Airport System, who led the delegation to India some three weeks ago, said the Air India officials gave a ‘‘favourable’’ response but remained non-committal.

In his presentation, Perez compared Houston with Dallas, before the Indian officials. ‘‘The Mumbai-Houston market is a larger market than Mumbai-Dallas. Air India service between Mumbai and Houston will generate more revenue than service between Mumbai and Dallas, regardless of the European gateway selected,’’ he argued.

Making a strong case, Perez said about 400 Houston companies trade with India, and 29 Houston companies have subsidiaries in India.