Kingfisher gets late-night flying idea

KOLKATA: Vijay Mallya’s Kingfisher Airlines (KFA) is planning to cash in on the marked rise in late-night travels. Come October-end, KFA is likely to start late-night flights to provide passengers with connectivity to other tier-II Indian cities from metros.

Initially, these may start from Mumbai and Delhi, but gradually, other metros are likely to be included in this network.

Another focus area for KFA, it is learnt, is inter-city day-return flights on any of its routes or what is known as same-day return connections. For instance, if a flight starts from Mumbai to Bangalore in the morning, a flight from Bangalore will take off for Mumbai at the same time and both return at the same time to help passengers return on the same day. Being in consolidation mode, the carrier is looking to build connectivity between metros and feeder routes. On Monday, KFA launched two flights — a thrice-daily Mumbai-Hyderabad-Mumbai and once-daily Mumbai-Jaipur-Mumbai. One of these flights is also being converted into a Hyderabad -Mumbai- Jaipur flight.

Recently, KFA and the North East Tourism Development Corporation signed a strategic alliance whereby KFA will help the tourism corporation promote the North East as the preferred tourism destination to holiday makers across the country. KFA will also provide dynamic and static advertising opportunities to the corporation via its in-flight entertainment - KFA offers five channels of FUN TV and 10 channels of music on Kingfisher Radio onboard.

The carrier, which currently services 17 cities through more than 100 flights, has been experiencing an average load factor of about 67%. It is expecting a 15% growth in traffic by the onset of the winter schedule, it is learnt.

It currently used a fleet of 16 ATRs and A320s. KFA follows a policy of using ATRS on new routes. Once these routes start maturing, the carrier switches to A320s.