Flying fares didn’t disrupt air traffic growth in November

Bangalore: The number of flyers in the domestic market jumped around 6% in November to 48.75 lakh from 46.17 lakh in October.
Year on year, that’s a growth of 26.68% from 38.48 lakh.
Almost all the local airlines registered high seat factors despite the fact that air ticket prices of some low-cost airlines were hovering over Rs25,000 per passenger on long-haul flights in November due to the festive season.
As per the ministry data, the seat factors of airlines ranged between 70% and 90% with IndiGo recording the highest at 91%.
Though, this was not the budget airline’s highest seat factor this year. In May, Rahul Bhatia-promoted no-frill airline had logged a seat factor of 93.2%.
Last month, IndiGo also overtook Air India in terms of market share as it expanded its aviation pie to 17.3% from 16.8%, moving to the third position. Air India slipped to fourth position as its share in the local market dropped to 17.1% from 17.7%.
An industry expert said the budget airline has been able to fly past the state-owned Air India because of its aggressive capacity addition.
Naresh Goyal’s airlines — Jet Airways and JetLite - maintained lead in the domestic market with a share of 26.2%, which was unchanged from October.
Kingfisher Airlines increased its market share by one percentage point to 19.1% while SpiceJet lost three percentage points and GoAir gained three percentage points.
But despite the growth in passenger numbers, the industry is not expecting yields - net revenue per seat — to firm up.
For the whole year, the industry is estimating yields be up by 5-7%. The overall cancellation rate last month was slightly up at 1.5%. A majority of the cancellations were due to technical faults and bad weather. The on-time performance (OTP) of airlines was 76.4%.
21/12/10 Suparna Goswami Bhattacharya & Supriya Ghorpade/Daily News & Analysis

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Categories: Indian Aviation- In General Dec 2010