Air India, which has been in the news for massive losses in the last financial year, is transferring the next bunch of sectors and stations to subsidiary Air India Express starting in September. This comes amidst the transfer of ex-Vistara all economy aircraft to Air India Express, which has started in tranches. Recently, Air India Express launched flights to Bhopal from Mumbai and Delhi, with Air India withdrawing some flights on the Delhi – Bhopal sector and completely withdrawing from the Mumbai – Bhopal sector. Air India Express announced on August 5, 2026 that it will add six new domestic destinations viz. Aurangabad, Coimbatore, Jamnagar, Jodhpur, Madurai and Tirupati, effective September 1, 2026. The addition takes the airline’s domestic network to 48 destinations, and its overall footprint, including international stations, to 64. Bookings are already open across the airline’s website, app and other channels.
The new stations connect into the airline’s four key metro bases. Aurangabad gets two daily flights to Delhi. Coimbatore and Jamnagar each get two daily flights to Mumbai. Jodhpur gets a daily flight each to Delhi and Mumbai. Madurai connects once daily to Chennai, and Tirupati once daily to Hyderabad. Alongside these launches, the airline is also adding frequency out of Delhi, with an extra daily flight each to Bhubaneswar, Kochi, Patna and Varanasi, taking Delhi – Bhubaneswar and Delhi – Patna to four times daily, and Delhi – Kochi and Delhi – Varanasi to twice daily.
A network that’s been quietly stacking up
This is not a standalone announcement — it is the latest in a string of expansions Air India Express has pushed through over the last few months. The airline started operations from Bhopal with daily flights to Delhi and Mumbai. It also became the first carrier to launch international services out of Navi Mumbai, with flights to Abu Dhabi, and it opened direct connectivity between the Northeast and the UAE through Guwahati – Dubai and Guwahati – Abu Dhabi services. Taken together, these moves show an airline that has been steadily working outward from its metro bases into secondary cities, while simultaneously testing new international gateways.
Air India Express has always occupied an interesting space within the Air India Group. Post the AirAsia India merger, it effectively became the group’s low-cost (though the airline calls itself value carrier), narrowbody arm, tasked with feeding traffic into both domestic secondary markets and short-haul international routes, particularly to the Gulf. That mandate explains why a pilgrimage city like Tirupati or a heritage circuit anchor like Aurangabad fits naturally into its map, even when the same cities may not justify a full-service Air India aircraft, yet have connecting traffic.
Why these six, and why now
The choice of cities reflects a fairly deliberate spread across business, industrial, cultural and pilgrimage traffic rather than a cluster in any one segment. Jamnagar brings an industrial and energy-linked market into the fold, connecting into Mumbai twice daily, a sector likely to carry a meaningful corporate travel component. Coimbatore, a manufacturing and textile hub, gets the same twice-daily Mumbai treatment, suggesting the airline expects steady point-to-point business demand rather than pure leisure traffic.
The southern add of Madurai and Tirupati leans into pilgrimage and heritage travel, both linking into their nearest metro base rather than criss-crossing the country, which keeps aircraft utilisation simple and rotations tight. Jodhpur’s dual connectivity to both Delhi and Mumbai is the most ambitious of the six, betting on Rajasthan’s tourism draw pulling from both ends of the country. Aurangabad, sitting at the doorstep of Ajanta and Ellora, gets Delhi connectivity twice daily, a market that has historically been underserved given the scale of tourist interest in the caves.
The frequency additions on the Delhi routes are just as telling. Bhubaneswar and Patna moving to four times daily each signals that Air India Express sees these as maturing markets rather than thin, seasonal ones. Kochi and Varanasi moving to twice daily is a more conservative bet, likely calibrated against existing capacity already flown by Air India and IndiGo on the same sectors.
Network Thoughts
This is the more interesting story hiding behind a fairly routine-sounding network expansion release. Six new destinations for Air India Express is good news on its own, but the real story is Air India using its low-cost arm to formalise an exit from markets it no longer wants to serve with its own metal, while keeping those passengers commercially within the group through interline sale and connections. It’s a cleaner, more mature version of network rationalisation than simply cutting a route and hoping the market finds another way to fly.
The open question is how far this handover goes. If Air India is willing to cede entire stations like Aurangabad and Jamnagar to Express, are markets like Jodhpur or Madurai just the beginning of a broader sorting exercise, where every secondary and tertiary city currently split across both brands eventually consolidates under Express? And where does group-level widebody or narrowbody capacity, including aircraft that may be freed up from the mainline side, actually get redeployed once these exits are complete?
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