Air India's quiet network retreat: Tokyo moves, Paris and San Francisco go, Malé pauses
Air India kept Colombo, Seoul and Jeddah. What it actually gave up is Mumbai–Paris, Bengaluru–San Francisco and Narita — plus a three-month Malé pause.
Start with the correction, because this desk got it wrong first and the wrong version is the more dramatic one.
This entry originally read that Air India had exited Colombo, Malé, Seoul–Incheon and Jeddah outright. That came off a Bandaranaike airport table which, on a second reading, carries no Air India row at all — it is simply an incomplete list, and an absent row is not an exit. Corrected 2 August 2026.
What actually changed
Air India’s own 13 May 2026 press note, and the schedule filing behind it, say something a good deal narrower:
- Delhi–Colombo goes from 14 to 13 weekly, and Mumbai–Colombo from 7 to 4. Trimmed, not dropped.
- Delhi–Malé and Chennai–Singapore are cancelled for 1 June to 31 August 2026 only — a summer pause, with the two routes back on 1 and 2 September.
- Seoul–Incheon and Jeddah are untouched. Neither route appears in the filing.
What genuinely left the map is elsewhere, and it left earlier:
- Mumbai–Paris is gone. Air France keeps the nonstop, so the city pair survives; the mainline metal on it does not.
- Bengaluru–San Francisco ended in February 2026.
- Tokyo moved from Narita to Haneda in March 2025 — not a cut at all, and the better airport of the two, but it changes which terminal an award itinerary lands in.
What it costs an award booker
Less than the first version of this story implied, which is the point of running the correction at the top rather than in a footnote.
Colombo is thinner, not dead: 13 weekly from Delhi and 4 from Mumbai is still a bookable market, and the seats that went were frequency, not the route. Maharaja Club prices on a flat destination-tier chart, so an all-mainline connection built via Delhi or Mumbai still costs the same number of points it did in May — the retreat shows up as availability pressure on specific days, not as a repricing.
Our Colombo, Seoul and Jeddah rows stand. The Malé rows were a three-month pause and are bookable again from 1 September 2026.
Our take: an airport’s departures table is not a schedule filing, and the gap between the two is exactly wide enough to publish a network exit that never happened. The rule this desk now applies to a carrier’s route list: an absent row is evidence of nothing until the airline’s own filing says the route is gone. Air India is consolidating — Paris and San Francisco are real losses on the long-haul map — but the eastward network the Maharaja Club chart is actually flown on is still there.