A number crunch that never was

New Delhi: More than 1.2 crore passengers chose the Jet Airways network (Jet and Jetlite) to fly across the country last year, while state-owned Nacil (Air India and Indian) managed to carry only about half that number.
The Kingfisher network (Kingfisher and Kingfisher Red) came a close second with more than 1.1 crore passengers.
In other words, Kingfisher and Jet together flew more than 2.3 crore Indians, while only a fourth of that -- or 66.3 lakh preferred Nacil's services.
So what has led to such dismal state of affairs at Nacil? Company officials blame "irrelevant marketing or sheer lack of marketing activities" for this state of affairs.
Nacil ranks second in market share -- after Jet Airways -- if its domestic service is compared against Jet and Kingfisher Airlines.
But still, many uncomfortable questions are being asked about the company's poor show. Also, in the fourth quarter, Nacil tumbled to the third position, with a market share of 17.6% against Jet's share of 18.4% and Kingfisher's share of 17.9%.
Nacil officials said load factors may improve this year as a new aircraft would be added to the domestic fleet almost every month and new routes could be opened. But they lamented the lack of passenger interest despite the recent fare cuts.
In another interesting trend, the proliferation of low-cost carriers like SpiceJet, GoAir, IndiGo and Paramount did little by way of affecting the dominance of the big airlines.
According to the latest data released by the ministry of civil aviation, every second domestic passenger prefers the Big Three (Jet, Kingfisher and Nacil domestic), who have a combined market share of 53.2% at the end of 2008.
Among LCCs, IndiGo led with a comfortable margin -- it carried 47.46 lakh passengers against SpiceJet's 40.69 lakh. A senior SpiceJet official said the airline faced capacity constraints during the year since it sub-leased a few aircraft on weak demand.
He also expressed hope that 2009 should be a far better performance year than 2008 due to substantial drop in operating costs (because of a steep decline in prices of aviation turbine fuel) and the resultant flexibility every airline now has in terms of fares.
However, seat factor (seats occupied versus total seats in an aircraft) across almost all airlines took a severe beating in the last four-five months of the year.Jet Airways' seat factor dropped from almost 76% in February to just 60% in December; Kingfisher's dropped from over 70% in January to 62.8% in December.
Nacil's domestic seat factor bounced to 60% at the end of the year after dropping to 53.3% in September.
14/01/09 Sindhu Bhattacharya/Daily News & Analysis

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Categories: Indian Aviation- In General Jan 2009