Jet plans to fly high with leisure travellers

Mumbai: Naresh Goyal, who has managed to woo corporate travellers to establish Jet Airways among India’s top airlines, is setting out to woo leisure travellers. In a bid to make up for reduced occupancies arising out of a cutback in discretionary expenditure, including travel and entertainment by companies, Jet plans to target leisure travellers to make up a third of its passenger base.
“Global experience shows us that a significant portion of economy class passengers tend to be leisure travellers. As Indian carriers, we have been catering largely to corporate travelers and the visiting friends and relatives category of the Indian diaspora. We need to diversify to target the growing middle class so that the leisure segment contributes as much as 30 per cent of our business mix,” said Sudheer Raghavan, chief commercial officer, Jet Airways (India). The company, which in the October-December 2008 quarter, lost as much as
Rs 2.32 crore per day, has been trying hard to fill its planes, to boost revenues at a time when full service airlines seem to be losing the battle to budget carriers.
The company recently launched its cut-price service Konnect, which services smaller cities where JetLite does not fly to. “Full service carriers are operating at an average passenger load factor of 60 per cent while carriers such as Paramount and Indigo are nudging closer to 80 per cent. The difference between a PLF of 60 per cent and 80 per cent could mean the difference between huge losses and healthy profits as the cost side of the equation remains the same regardless of which of the two occupancies you are running the flight with,” says Ashwini Kakkar, vice chairman of the Oberoi group affiliate Mercury Travels.
Data released by the directorate general of civil aviation show that Jet Airways and JetLite together carried 7.96 lakh passengers in April 2009 vs 8.61 lakh for Kingfisher a much later entrant into the aviation business.
18/05/09 Yassir A Pitalwalla/mydigitalfc

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Categories: Jet Airways May 2009