Air India Express and Transavia offer contrasting but complementary lessons on growth, digital transformation and the enduring power of brand in a price-driven world.
What does a budget airline in the Netherlands have in common with a low-cost carrier reshaping mobility across India? More than you might expect and the differences are just as instructive.
At the Trip.com Airline Global Conference in Amsterdam in May, Manish Puri, Head of Global Sales, Air India and Air India Express and Sam Gertsen, Head of Partnerships at Transavia, sat down for a frank conversation about the evolving role of low-cost carriers in an industry being remade by demographics, digitisation and decarbonisation.
The session, moderated by WiT’s Siew Hoon Yeoh, surfaced a set of tensions that define the LCC moment: scale versus constraint, brand versus price, AI ambition versus infrastructure reality.
Two carriers, two mandates
Air India Express was born in 2005 with a focused mandate: serve the labour and leisure corridor between South India and the Gulf. Two decades on, that mission has been fundamentally redrawn.
When the Tata Group took the controls of Air India in 2022, Express was repositioned as the group’s domestic and short-haul engine, tasked with stimulating tier-two and tier-three city connectivity across India.
“AirIndia Express will be the main catalyst for getting most of that narrow-body growth,” said Puri, noting a fleet of around 50 aircraft with significant expansion planned. “And those routes will feed into the wide body, bringing customers from two- and three-tier cities into the international network.”
Transavia, by contrast, is celebrating its 60th year — a low-cost subsidiary of Air France-KLM that is, as Gertsen wryly noted, better known to Asian travellers via Trip.com than through its own website. “Customers from outside Europe book more easily on Trip.com than on our own site, given the trust they bring to it,” he said. “That tells you something about where brand recognition is built today.”
“AirIndia Express will be the main catalyst for getting most of that narrow-body growth,” said Puri, noting a fleet of around 50 aircraft with significant expansion planned. “And those routes will feed into the wide body, bringing customers from two- and three-tier cities into the international network.”
The scale paradox
Gertsen admitted to envying India’s growth runway. Transavia is transitioning its fleet from Boeing 737s to Airbus A321s – a move that will unlock nearly double-digit annual capacity growth for the next seven years without adding a single new route. “That’s how we compete at scale in Western Europe,” he said. “But sometimes I must admit I’m very jealous of the situation in India, where growth possibilities are much larger.”
Puri did not disagree. India’s young population combined with a rapidly expanding middle class and a geography that keeps almost all of Asia within a six-hour flight radius, creates a structural growth story that few markets can match. From roughly 78 domestic airports a decade ago, India now serves around 158 destinations. “The buying capacity is going up very, very exponentially,” Puri said. “There is a huge opportunity to grow the Air India Express brand.”
But scale cuts both ways. Puri was candid about the systemic bottlenecks that come with ambition at Indian speed. With 500 aircraft on order, the question is not whether demand will materialise — it is whether the ecosystem of airports, infrastructure and regulation can keep pace. “The entire system has to be ready,” he said. “If we’ve ordered the planes and the airports can’t manage it, that’s the real constraint.”
Brand equity: The LCC’s hidden moat
Both panellists pushed back on the notion that low-cost means low-differentiation. Both Puri and Gertsen were quick to affirm that price is the threshold but not the ceiling.
“Brand equity is very important,” said Gertsen. “We measure it from day to day and ours is significantly higher than our competitors. Given the cost and price pressure, brand equity is how we distinguish ourselves.”
For Air India Express, brand is being rebuilt from scratch. Puri acknowledged that the airline — now barely three years under Tata stewardship — considers itself a startup. “There is no harm and no shame in learning from organisations like MakeMyTrip or what the OTAs are doing for the customer,” he said. “If we can learn and offer that — sometimes they are much closer to the customer than we are.”
“Brand equity is very important,” said Gertsen. “We measure it from day to day and ours is significantly higher than our competitors. Given the cost and price pressure, brand equity is how we distinguish ourselves.”
Digital: Mobile-first, AI-forward
On digital transformation, the two airlines are at different stages but moving in the same direction.
India’s mobile-first market has created both an imperative and an opportunity. “India skipped the desktop generation,” said Puri, noting that smartphone penetration runs deep into tier-two and tier-three cities. The Air India group has established an in-house IT division in Kochi with nearly 2,000 engineers, a signal of the seriousness with which the group is approaching technology as a competitive lever. Key digital priorities: multilingual interfaces, personalisation at scale, and conversational AI via WhatsApp and chat.
Transavia is further along the AI deployment curve. Gertsen outlined three live or near-live AI initiatives: AI-powered dynamic pricing (already running with a human control group), an AI customer service assistant that operates when call centres are closed, and — most intriguingly for the distribution community in the room — an MCP (Model Context Protocol) integration designed to make Transavia bookable through AI agents and LLM-powered interfaces.
“We need to be ready for AI-generated distribution,” Gertsen said. “Whether through our own website or through large language models — the front door of travel is changing.”
