It was announced that India’s most famous budget airline Simplifly Deccan (formerly Air Deccan) will now be called Kingfisher Red. It will have a separate brand identity from  Kingfisher Airlines. Though we wonder how much of a separate brand identity is that if two airlines from the same group co-exist, with a little word - Red - attached to one end of that! Well, we should allow corporates, and brand identity gurus their fancies, I guess.

So we are beginning to call Simplifly Deccan (something that sounds like you bit into something sour) into a less tongue-twisting Kingfisher Red from now on.

The good thing is that the takeover and makeover by the UB Group seems to be doing Kingfisher Red’s quaity a lot of good. The Kingfisher Red planes look a lot better turned out, air hostesses look less weary, and the overall air is a lot more upmarket than the state transport bus feel of the earlier aircraft.

Here’s what Kingfisher Red says on its website:

Welcome to a new class of low fare flying… Seats get more comfortable, rewards get bigger, and service gets a lot better. What doesn’t change though, are the low fares!

New features of Kingfisher Red post-rebranding would be web check-in, city check-in, some stuff to read in the flights like a full service airline, frequent flyer program that offers access to Kingfisher lounges (yay!) and priority check-in.

The announcement said that the airline would soon replace its signature colour blue with red. I thought it was already happening. No matter. Like I said, brand gurus’ fantasies…

There was a study by the company to asses market perceptions, and it turned out that the airline is now associated with bad service quality, late flights, and all the things that can go wrong.

My experience with them has always been good however. Nothing worse than your average full service airline. In their Air Deccan days, Simplifly Deccan tongue-twisting days and now in the Kingfisher Red days, they were always adequate.

I guess I should thank the brand gurus, though. Anyone who has a hand in banishing the word Simplifly out of our daily conversation and news articles deserves a hug.

Some of our most popualr news articles about Kingfisher Red, formerly Air Deccan.

There was this famous stong operation by the news channel CNN-IBN on Kingfisher Red, called Air Deccan then, in 2007. The news channel said that the airline was deliberately offloading passengers. After strong denials from Air Deccan, the story died a quiet death.

This was one of this site’s most popular stories in our flights section for a while. That was when Air Deccan announced its famous one rupee flight tickets. Much watre has flowed under the bridge since then - budget more airlines started operating, Air Deccan had its IPO, financial troubles, and finally the takeover by Vijay Mallya, and now finally the new name Kingfisher Red. In the low budget airline space, we think Kigfisher Red still is the most significant player.

Immediately after the takeover by Kingfisher, the makeover began. Mallya knows a thing or two about looks, you see. And therefore we have the air hostesses in smarter attire, and overall better systems, and a few lessons learnt from the more upmarket Kingfisher Air. This was our story when the makeover began, culminating in the latest name as Kingfisher Red

One of our recently most popular stories was the Deccan SkyLimo service - which is an air taxi service from Bangalore airport. Let us not get into what it says about Bangalore’s infrastructure. But apart from that, the idea was good and solved an existing problem. Tired passengers alighting from their flights could catch a quick flight in a Deccan SkyLimo. This too would now be renamed as Kingfisher Red Limo or something similar, we expect.