After four years of the merger of Indian Airlines with Air India, the national carrier -- Air India -- will have single code -- AI code from February for all its domestic and international flights.

Presently, Air India was operating its flights with two seperate codes -- IC coded flights on domestic sector and AI coded on international sector -- causing inconvience to the passengers as they had to travel on separate tickets for domestic and international flights.

The new ticketing system with single code, following the successful trials, would be in place by February-mid, an Air India spokesperson said, adding this would hasten Air India's entry into Star Alliance, the world's largest integrated air transport network.

"This would ensure a number of additional facilities which would make the passengers' journey enjoyable and hassle-free," said Arvind Jadhav, Chairman and Managing Director, indicating that the single code, AI, would be formally launched sometime around mid-February.

With switching to the new industry standard Passenger Service System (PSS), the airline could enjoy many advantages.

Passengers could avail of the facilities of automate baggage reconciliation; enabling kiosk check-in across the network; and also mobile check-ins.

It would also help to speed up the integration of the merged Indian Airlines and Air-India, the official said.

The new system is being implemented by SITA, the world's leading specialist in air transport communications and information technology (IT) solutions, an Air India spokesperson said, adding SITA was selected following a worldwide tendering process.

Once the single code becomes fully operational, Air India passengers would no longer have separate codes for domestic and international travel.

Like passengers from Aizwal to Toronto via any other destinations would have a single ticket and therefore seamless travel, he said.

This single code functioning is a key condition to join Star Alliance, in which member-airlines share each other's code, allowing passengers to travel with multiple airlines on the same ticket.

The new system, which was implemented in a record time of 300 days, involved migration from two different systems to a third system even as it was in compliance with Star Alliance requirements.

The first major dry run of the new system was done on January 15 and the final migration to the new system is scheduled to take place around mid-February, the spokesperson said, adding the new system is likely to aid Air-India's turnaround by joining the Star Alliance, which has 26 carriers as members.