'Kingfisher still enjoys goodwill among travellers'

Kingfisher Airlines still enjoys goodwill among Indian travellers who are optimistic about its revival sometime in the future, according to a recent survey conducted by tripadvisor.in, a global travel site.

As many as 74 per cent of the respondents to the survey, conducted across 2,800 respondents a fortnight ago, were optimistic about the revival of Kingfisher airline, TripAdvisor India country manager, Nikhil Ganju, told mediapersons on Wednesday.

Kingfisher's operations were stalled since October 1, this year following a strike by its pilots and engineering staff over non-payment of salaries.

This year, according to the survey, IndiGo and Jet Airways were close contenders for the title of "Favourite Domestic Airline", displacing two time winner Kingfisher Airlines, with IndiGo taking the lead by a small margin.

The survey, however, stated that Air India closely followed by Kingfisher was perceived as the most unsafe airline by Indian travellers while Jet Airways was voted as the safest domestic

airline closely followed by IndiGo.

With regard to international travel, Emirates leads for the third year in a row with 26 per cent of the respondents voting it as the "Best International Airline" followed by Singapore Airline (15 per cent) and Lufthansa (11 per cent).

Releasing the survey, Ganju said the aim of TripAdvisor, which started its operations in India in 2008, was to become the largest travel site in the country in a couple of years.

"TripAdvisor is currently the number one Website in the country for destinations and accommodations. Now, we want to become the largest travel site also on the transactions side," he said.

Hyderabad

Ganju said that travellers were the least optimistic about Kingfisher's revival in future. They prefer IndiGo over all other domestic travellers.

According to him, Hyderabad has the highest percentage of travellers across six metros in the country. Over 43 per cent of the city travellers were high on adventure. About 63 per cent of the respondents said that they would spend between Rs 50,000 to Rs 200,000 on travel.