Air India Employees to Soon Get Promotions

Saturday, 23rd March 2013 at 03:16am

Employees of Air India will definitely be jumping up and down upon hearing the news that finally their promotions, which have been long overdue, will soon be realized.

While, of course, not all of them get this career boost in their employment, certainly this will allow many employees, especially those who are deserving enough, to get promoted and get recognized of their hard work and contributions to the company.

The union of the country's largest airlines in 2007 has delayed the promotions of deserving employees mainly due to the differences in the two airlines' human resources policies.

An official from Air India recently disclosed that they will start evaluating their employees' performance next month.

The airline wants to sustain its growth in the long term prompting them to include the promotions of their employees as among their priorities.

For the first time since 2007 when Air India and Indian Airlines began its merger to become Air India today, the flag carrier has recorded profit in its 5-year old operations as one entity. Now that it sees profit, albeit modest, it is now planning to implement other initiatives in the company that include, among others, improve its ancillary revenues. Some of these revenue sources will come from advertisements aboard the planes and terminal lounges, tapping of government and corporate carriers and make its frequent-flyer program interesting enough to the customers.

The airline is planning to spin off its frequent-flyer program into a separate entity completely independent from the airline. Members will be issued new cards which they can use in various hotels and restaurants like they would normally do to their credit or debit cards. The official added that the airline is now negotiating with ITC hotels regarding the issue.

For the first time since the merger, Air India has posted growth in the current fiscal year, becoming profitable with EBIDTA (Earnings Before Interest Depreciation Tax and Amortization) of Rs20 crore.

The resulting profit of Rs20 crore has enabled Air India to cut its net loss by Rs2,361 crore as against the previous fiscal year's record of Rs7,559 crore. It is expected to shave off its net loss further down to Rs3,900 crore.

By: Pete Lee.