After being hit by a fuel price hike and capacity cut, airlines such as Jet Airways, Kingfisher, SpiceJet and IndiGo are adding more flights in the domestic routes, anticipating better demand in the festival season ahead.
Vijay Mallya-promoted Kingfisher Airlines is planning to launch six Airbus A321s in the next six months and will deploy these on around 10 new routes (such as Mumbai-Pune) a day, apart from short haul international destinations, sources said. It is also planning to deploy ATRs on two new destinations, Latur and Nanded, in Maharashtra.
While Kingfisher is looking at adding at least 15 new flights in the winter season, competitors Jet Airways, SpiceJet, IndiGo and Paramount are adding over 30 new flights together (arrivals and departures); they will do this through a combination of better utilisation of existing aircraft and inducting new fleet. The new flights will be to destinations like Hyderabad, Coimbatore, Chennai, Pune, Goa and Vishakhapatnam apart from smaller destinations like Rajamundhry and Tirupati.
"We have inducted two ATRs (80 seater) and opened three new stations, Rajamundhry, Tirupati and Vishakhapatnam. We also have connected Hyderabad to some of these destinations, as well as Pune to destinations like Hyderabad and Hyderabad to Goa," said Jet CEO Wolfgang Prock-Schauer.
Prock-Schauer said that they are expecting demand to go up in the festive season and are increasing capacity albeit cautiously. "Fares will also increase by at least 10 per cent in this season" he added.
Jet Airways, the country's largest airlines by market share, is also planning to launch three more ATRs this year.
These ATRs would be operating nine frequencies. The flights will primarily be in the southern routes. Company sources said that the airlines would mostly deploy the low-capacity aircraft on domestic routes. Using lower capacity aircraft would lead to improved load factors for the airline. Jet, whose average loads had fallen below 70 per cent during August, expects its loads to go beyond 70 per cent by deploying these flights.
"We saw that most of the capacity decrease was in cities like Hyderabad and Bangalore and those areas were going underserviced. Hence, we started flights to those cities," said a SpiceJet executive.
Budget airlines IndiGo, which has already started four additional flights, will start more flights. "We will gradually add more flights in the winter schedule and in October," said Bruce Ashby CEO of IndiGo.
For airlines like SpiceJet, whose aircraft has been lying grounded because of the decrease in flights, this will mean better utilisation of their aircraft. "Our aircraft utilisation will increase by almost half-an-hour-a-day, due to the added flights," said a SpiceJet executive.
South Indian premium carrier Paramount Airways also has major plans to increase capacity, albeit to the smaller cities. The carrier that has connected six southern cities such as Thiruvananthapuram, Chennai, Kochi and Madurai to Ahmedabad will now venture to other cities like Goa and Pune.
"We have plans to go to other western cities like Bhopal, Nagpur, Porbandhar and Bhuj," said M Thiagarajan, managing director, Paramount.
The carrier's total number of daily flights will go from the current 54 to 64 by the end of this year, while its fleet number will be increased to nine from the current seven.
