Domestic carriers close in on their international rivals

New Delhi: Domestic airline companies Jet Airways, Kingfisher and Air India are starting to overtake international carriers on certain key global routes and challenge their decades of domination.
Data available from international aviation consultancy Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation (CAPA) shows that Kingfisher and Jet, which have a combined 40 per cent share of weekly capacity on the India-Hong-Kong route, now offer the same number of seats as Cathay Pacific, the official airline of Hong Kong.
Add in Air India with a 10 per cent capacity share and Indian carriers are offering more seats than Cathay on this route.
Similarly, Singapore Airlines’ long-standing domination of the lucrative India-Singapore route is also under pressure. Singapore’s flag carrier and its sister airline Silk Air’s share of the weekly capacity on this route (46 per cent) is just a few percentage points more than the Indian carriers — Kingfisher (7 per cent), Jet Airways (12 per cent and Air India (24 per cent) put together.
Neither Cathay nor Singapore Airlines replied to emails.
The trend is not limited to south east Asia. On the UK-India route, Jet Airways and Kingfisher have a combined 31 per cent share of the weekly capacity closing in on to British Airways, which has dominated the market.
Add in Air India (with a 21 per cent share) and Indian carriers have already overtaken British Airways and Virgin Atlantic (5 per cent) combined in terms of capacity share on the route.
India’s share will only get bigger once SpiceJet enters the fray from June to fly south east Asia and south Asian countries and Kingfisher recently receiving permission to nearly double its international flights to locations like London and Singapore.
London, Singapore, Hong Kong, Bangkok and Dubai account for 40 per cent of the international aviation market from India.
15/02/10 Surajeet Das Gupta & Mihir Mishra/Business Standard

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Categories: Foreign Feb 2010, Indian Aviation- In General Feb 2010