Air India And Drukair Put Bhutan On One Ticket
Air India and Drukair, also known as Royal Bhutan Airlines, have signed an interline agreement allowing passengers to book journeys on both carriers under a single ticket.
- Single-ticket booking across both airlines, with coordinated baggage handling and transfers
- Hub: Indira Gandhi International Airport, Delhi
- Air India passengers gain access to Paro, and onward to Bumthang, Gelephu and Yonphula
- Drukair passengers connect through Delhi, Guwahati and Kolkata to Air India’s domestic network
- Onward international access includes Paris, Frankfurt, London, New York, Newark, Melbourne, Sydney, Toronto, Vancouver, San Francisco and Colombo
What An Interline Deal Changes For Air India Passengers
An interline agreement is not a new route. Neither airline is flying anywhere it was not flying before, and no aircraft has moved.
What changes is the paperwork, which for a passenger is most of the experience. Instead of two separate bookings, two check-ins and collecting bags to re-check them in Delhi, the journey becomes one ticket with baggage handled through to the destination. When a connection fails, one ticket also means one airline is responsible for fixing it.
Bhutan Is Hard To Reach By Design
Air India passengers gain connections to Paro from the wider international network via Delhi, then onward to Bumthang, Gelephu and Yonphula. Drukair passengers get Delhi, Guwahati and Kolkata into Bengaluru, Mumbai, Kochi and the rest.
Paro is one of the more demanding commercial airports anywhere, ringed by mountains and served by a small number of certified crews, which limits how many carriers can fly there at all. That scarcity is exactly why an interline deal does more for Bhutan than for a market where a traveller has ten routing options.
A Regional Argument, Not A Tourism One
Air India framed the agreement as strengthening connectivity across the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation region, which it treats as an extended home market. Chief commercial officer Nipun Aggarwal called Bhutan a valued part of that region.
Drukair chief executive Tandi Wangchuk described it as a milestone in expanding global connectivity. For a national carrier of a country with one international airport, an interline agreement with a large neighbour is the cheapest available route to a global network, and it costs no new aircraft.
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