Wednesday, January 23, 2019

December sees highest ever domestic flyers at 1.3 crore

New Delhi: Almost 14 crore people flew within the country in 2018, up 18.8% from previous year’s 11.7 crore. And, December 2018 saw the highest ever number of domestic air travel in a month, with nearly 1.3 crore people flying within the country in the holiday season.

Despite this growth, two big airlines — Air India and Jet — are struggling to survive and all others are deep in red. The “profit-less growth” comes largely due to factors like jet fuel cost for domestic flights being among the highest in India globally, rupee’s weakness against dollar, steep operating costs and a crippling infrastructure shortage at almost all key Indian airports both on runway and terminal side.

IndiGo remained the leader of domestic skies, with its market share going up to 41.5% for the whole year. Jet and Air India were distant number two and three with market share at 15.5% and 12.7%, respectively.


Rating agency ICRA recently said the three listed Indian carriers — Jet Airways, IndiGo and SpiceJet — lost Rs 20 crore per day in April-September 2018. Collectively, Indian airlines are likely to lose over Rs 8,800 crore in FY 2019, ICRA had estimated.

SpiceJet was at number four and fast catching up with AI. SpiceJet’s chief sales and revenue officer Shilpa Bhatia said: “We are happy to finish 2018 on a high note by registering the highest passenger load factor of 92.7% in December — a feat we accomplished every single month of the previous year. In fact, this is the 45th monthin-a-row that we have flown with the highest loads in India and we will strive to better ourselves in 2019.”
23/01/19 Times of India
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