TLDR: I tried to redeem two business class vouchers but couldn't do it in one booking and had to risk doing it one by one but succeeded.
Axis Vistara Infinite holder here. I wanted to share my voucher and point redemption experience yesterday for the first time after the migration. Me and wife are flying from Pune to Delhi and back. I had more than 40k points and 2 Business Class vouchers from my card usage in the previous year.
My first idea was to redeem the two business class vouchers for me and wife for return journey from Del to Pnq. (it seems to be a better use case of business class vouchers due to getting to bypass the longer checkin lines, separate sec check lines and premium air india lounge access). Pune to anywhere is a waste of business class voucher experience due to lack of special airport facilities.
When I logged in to flying returns, i selected the preferred flight and saw that it had 2 business class seats available. I tried booking directly through the website but it allows booking only one traveller at a time. This is the biggest negative of Air India vs Vistara where I could redeem multiple vouchers and book multiple passengers on the same PNR in one go. My fear was that i will book one traveller and what if the system doesn't allow me to book the second traveller for a weird reason (i mean who knows with air india). What if i don't get to book the second business class seat. Will me and my wife sit in different classes? Of most I was afraid of my wifes scolding who would rather have me book normal flight tickets the way normal people do on travel apps than all this voucher and point redemption business that she doesn't care for. 🙁 So i called customer care. I badly missed my Vistara Infinite Call Centre experience with extremely polite executives happy to serve and clear phone lines. Air India the english language comprehension was there but i could sense the difference in quality of the executive training and politeness. the line was so crackly i had to repeat and get the cc executive to repeat our words multiple times. Anyways, the executive seemed or rather claimed to have the ability to block 2 business class seats for a short duration and then redeem the 2 vouchers for them before they go away and started to do so when suddenly the line dropped. I waited 5 mins and called in again and the 2nd executive said wait 20 mins the first executive should call you back. I waited one hour. No call. I called in again and 3rd executive said we cannot book multiple passengers on one PNR when redeeming a business class voucher even if you have multiple vouchers and are on the same flight. I nearly lost it at this point but controlled myself. Phone line was so bad i hung up and decided to do it myself on the system with fingers crossed. Thankfully my fears were not realized and i successfully redeemed my vouhers for both passengers one by one on different PNR's but both in business class on the same flight. Thankfully was able to book both of us without any glitches. The tax for each ticket was 580rs. each
I just tried to see a March 2025 booking and the minimum points for PNQ to DEL now has become 7500 points with Flying Returns instead of 4500 as the minimum i had seen for same sector when it was Vistara CV. Definitely the amount of seats available always affects the points. Since the day we wanted to travel was in a few days, the tickets were more expensive and point requirement much higher. I used up 19000 points plus tax to book a flight which even if I had booked a cheap indigo for the same day would have costed me atleast 18000rs on a cleartrip/makemytrip after cc discount. so still it's good enough value for me not to want to discontinue this card which has been on my mind.
Next I used up my points to book both of our journey our PNQ to DEL journey on the same PNR which was easy enough. Surprisingly the tax for point redemption was double at Rs. 1347/- each. Go figure!
