While travelers have petitioned airlines for everything from better change policies and accommodation for plus-size travelers to more transparency on what the passenger is entitled to in the case of delays, calls to add a route to a particular airport are much rarer and usually reserved for smaller underserved regions.
More often, airlines determine which routes to add based on a combination of traffic numbers and growth in a given area as was the case with the newly-constructed Felipe Carrillo International Airport in Tulum after the small Mayan-era seaside town started growing in popularity among travel influencers.
Related: This is why you won’t be able to get a low-cost flight to Tulum anytime soon
But at the start of March, regular travelers of the Tata Group-owned Air India got fed up with not having a flight out of a city many need to fly into and launched a petition for the airline to create one.
An Air India Airbus A320-251N plane stands on the tarmac in Toulouse, France. Photographer: Matthieu Rondel/Bloomberg via Getty Images.
Passengers say: ‘We request a direct flight’
“We request Air India to start a direct flight from Dallas to Hyderabad, India,” the Change.org petition started by Venkat Mulukutla reads. “Dallas Fort Worth metroplex and surrounding areas are considered [a] Telugu speaking hub. Out of 400 thousand Indians in DFW, at least 50-60% are Telugu people. Every year, lots of Telugu students coming to Dallas to study while a lot of Telugu including elderly parents are traveling to live with their children.”
Mulukutla lives in nearby Frisco, Texas and is a member of the Indian ethnic group that is a majority in Hyderabad and for whom he is advocating.
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Within 30 days of being launched, the online petition gained 3,730 signatures and is currently aiming to surpass the 5,000 mark. As the country’s flagship airline, Air India’s U.S. network currently includes flights to New York, Newark, Washington. D.C., Chicago and San Francisco from Indian metropolises such as New Delhi and Mumbai.
Since the start of the year, rumors swirled that it was also planning to launch new flights to Seattle, Los Angeles and Dallas. The latter route is what signers of the petition hope to hasten as it would help them not fly through a longer route that commonly goes through either Chicago, Dubai in the United Arab Emirates or Doha in Qatar.
‘Reach Hyderabad/Dallas directly without any hassles’
“If we have a direct Air India flight from Dallas to Hyderabad and Hyderabad to Dallas, that will save some layover [time] in between and reach Hyderabad/Dallas directly without any hassles,” the petition reads further.
But as Hyderabad is only India’s fourth-largest city, the launch of such a route is significantly less probable even if Air India does follow through with plans to expand into Dallas. Plans for Air India’s expansion into new U.S. cities that were initially reported in January 2024 also appear to have stalled as no official news or even rumblings from the airline in that direction have come in the last four months.
A few years ago, people on the social media platform Reddit (RDDT) have commented that they should petition United Airlines (UAL) to bring back its flight between Chicago and Erie, Penn. but stayed short of actually filing an official petition like with the Dallas-Hyderabad flight.
