SIA to introduce new cabin class in flights to India from October

Singapore Airlines (SIA) on Tuesday said it will introduce a new cabin class -- premium economy -- on its flights to Delhi and Mumbai from coming October.

New Delhi: Singapore Airlines (SIA) on Tuesday said it will introduce a new cabin class -- premium economy -- on its flights to Delhi and Mumbai from coming October.

The new cabin class, however, will be for the first time introduced on select flights to Sydney from Singapore on August 9, and it has already commenced bookings for the Australian route, a release said here.

This will subsequently be made available to other destinations served by the airline's Airbus A380s and Boeing 777-300ERs, in addition to the future fleet of Airbus A350s, it said.

The premium economy on the India routes will be introduced on the jumbo Airbus 380, which the airline operates on its Delhi and Mumbai routes.

While the premium economy class on Singapore-Delhi flights will be rolled out on October 13, it will start on the Mumbai sector from October 21, the airline said.

Currently, newly launched Vistara, in which SIA holds 49 percent stake besides 51 percent by Tata Group, is the only carrier in the country with premium economy class on its flights.

The new cabin class will be progressively introduced to other sectors, including Beijing, Hong Kong, Frankfurt, London, New York, Shanghai, Tokyo and Zurich in the latter part of 2015 and early 2016, the release said.

"We have been heartened by the highly positive public reaction to our new premium economy class since our plans were announced last year...We are confident it will be well received by travellers who are looking for more features," Singapore Airlines Chief Executive Goh Choon Phong said.

SIA was the first airline to opearte A380 aricraft to India.

Singapore Airlines, along with its low-cost arm SilkAir, operates 92 weekly flights from 11 cities -- New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad, Kochi, Hyderabad, Coimbatore, Visakhapatnam, Thiruvananthapuram. PTI IAS
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Twitter expands ads to outside websites, apps

San Francisco: Twitter unveiled plans on Tuesday to sell ads that run outside its own platform in what could be the start of a broader advertising network.

The one-to-many messaging service announced it would begin syndicating its "promoted tweets" to allow advertisers to reach people who are not on Twitter itself.

The first partners for the service will be Yahoo Japan and the news app Flipboard.

Because tweets are already embedded in those services, the new arrangement will allow advertisers to deliver promoted messages directly to users of those services.

"These new partnerships open a significant opportunity to extend the reach of their message to a larger audience," Twitter's Ameet Ranadive said in a blog post.

"Syndicated ads will be seen by users within Twitter content sections on third-party properties, as well as within third-party content areas."

The move allows an advertiser to run a simultaneous campaign on and off Twitter, Ranadive noted.

"Thousands of Web and mobile applications already syndicate Tweets to provide compelling content experiences, through products such as Fabric and Twitter for Websites," he added.

"Combine that with the flexibility and control of a promoted tweet, and we think marketers will have an almost infinite capacity to create large-scale, rich and well-targeted advertising campaigns across a variety of platforms. In a small number of private tests with Flipboard, both Flipboard and our advertising partners saw promising results."

Twitter, which unveils quarterly results this week, has been under pressure to show both revenue and user growth following its highly anticipated 2013 initial public offering.

Twitter is seeking to boost engagement with users amid growth which has been slower than some analysts have expected.

In October, Twitter said the number of monthly users grew 23 percent from a year earlier to 284 million.

A Pew Research Center report showed that among US users, Twitter is behind Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Instagram in the number of users.

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