Kingfisher & AI woes, lack of good airports and freeze on permits for new flights all contribute to the decline
There has been a substantial fall in the growth rate of international
passenger carriage by Indian airline companies during 2011, as compared
to 2010.
Among the reasons are ailing Kingfisher Airlines pulling out flights
and the financial problems of carriers, leading to reliability issues.
International passenger carriage by Indian airlines - Air India (AI),
Jet Airways, Kingfisher, SpiceJet and IndiGo ply abroad - rose during
2010 by 16.2 per cent. Directorate general of civil aviation (DGCA) data
shows they carried 13.2 million passengers on flights abroad in 2011, a
rise from 12.9 mn in 2010. Or, a percentage rise of barely three per
cent.
The Indian carriers witnessed a decline in international passenger
carriage of 14 per cent, 16.9 per cent and 14.8 per cent in the months
of October, November and December, the period when Kingfisher started
pulling out flights. International carriers, however, increased their
passenger load by 9.3 per cent to 26.7 mn during 2011 from 24.4 mn
during 2010.
The growth in number of international passengers, inbound and
outbound, during the period also slowed to 7.5 per cent, to 39.9 mn This
number had grown in 2010 by 11.4 per cent to 33.3 mn in 2010.
Reasons
Insiders feel Indian carriers lack in reliability, public perception and
network, with things getting worse after Kingfisher's pull out. "All
the full-service Indian carriers are in bad financial shape, thus
impacting their operations. This has raised questions on their
reliability and has earned them a bad name. The pull out by Kingfisher
and various strikes in AI has also impacted the public perception about
Indian carriers," said Ajay Prakash, president of the Travel Agents
Federation of India, representing half of the country's travel agents.
He said there was a time when AI was one of the top 10 airlines in
the world. Not now. "International carriers provide brilliant network
and service, attracting passengers," he added.
Some airlines say the government's long freeze on new applications
for Indian carriers to fly abroad has led to this. "The foreign carriers
are utilising almost all their bilateral rights in most of the cases
but we have been barred from going international to protect our national
carrier (AI). Had we been allowed to go international, things would
have been much better," said a senior Jet executive, who did not want to
be identified.
India has signed bilateral rights with 109 countries and offers
carriers 834,000 weekly seats on international air routes. Indian
carriers utilise only 22.7 per cent of the total bilateral quota,
contrary to around 40 per cent utilisation by foreign carriers. Of the
22.7 per cent utilisation by Indian carriers, AI has 11.9 per cent and
the other four private carriers that fly abroad together utilise the
other 10.8 per cent.
Measures
New civil aviation minister Ajit Singh has just recently allowed
increasing the utilisation of foreign bilateral rights for Indian
carriers to 40 per cent from the summer schedule, starting April.
However, others say much more is needed. "We cannot compete with
international carriers just by more flights. The bigger problem is that
the international carriers have been allowed to fly even to smaller
cities, where they get lot of passengers. Even if we fly more, it will
be difficult for us to recover the market share lost dee to Kingfisher's
absence," said a senior AI executive, who did not want to be
identified.
He further said there was a lack of world-class airports, which could
become hubs. "Passengers are ready to take a stop at Dubai and
Frankfurt but the same passengers do not want to stop at an Indian
airport. Barring Delhi, we do not have any of international standard.
Foreign carriers also attract a lot of traffic (through the sixth
freedom, the right of a commercial aviation company to fly from a
foreign country to another while stopping in one's own country for
non-technical reasons) that they route through their hubs," the official
added. A sixth of the total traffic foreign carriers have is through
this, routed through their hubs to their respective destinations.
No comments:
Post a Comment