  Minimal hybrid inflation in supergravity has been ruled out by the 2015
Planck observations because the spectral index of the produced curvature
perturbation falls outside observational bounds. To resurrect the model, a
number of modifications have been put forward but many of them spoil the
accidental cancellation that resolves the eta-problem and require complicated
Kahler constructions to counterbalance the lost cancellation. In contrast, in
this paper the model is rendered viable by supplementing the scenario with a
brief period of thermal inflation, which follows the reheating of primordial
inflation. The scalar field responsible for thermal inflation requires a large
non-zero vacuum expectation value (VEV) and a flat potential. We investigate
the VEV of such a flaton field and its subsequent effect on the inflationary
observables. We find that, for large VEV, minimal hybrid inflation in
supergravity produces a spectral index within the 1-sigma Planck bound and a
tensor-to-scalar ratio which may be observable in the near future. The
mechanism is applicable to other inflationary models.
