Sanjiv Kapoor, who had helped in turnaround of SpiceJet, says the practice is unsustainable in the long run; better to offload extra inventory with discounts well in advance
Vistara, the airline jointly owned by the Tatas and Singapore Airlines, does not believe in low airfares offered by rival airlines a day before the flight.
Taking a dig at such low fares offered by the competition, Sanjiv Kapoor, chief strategy and commercial officer, Vistara, said such offers are unsustainable in the long run.
Kapoor, who in his earlier stint with the low-cost carrier SpiceJet, had pioneered deep discounts on advance booking.
"Last minute deep discounts are like a drug -- short-term false fix, long-term disaster," Kapoor tweeted on Monday.
When certain start-up entrepreneurs and others who followed him on social media pointed out that he had earlier offered similar discounts during his earlier stint at SpiceJet, Kapoor responded saying that the extra inventory should be sold off in discount well in advance and not used to trash the last minutes fares.
"No airline can sustain such last-minute fares, regardless of business model," he said.
Speaking with dna during an event last week, Kapoor had said that despite the low fares, the industry now cannot take the growth in the aviation industry for certain as against what it was in in 2014.
"Now the capacity has increased much in comparison. Also, earlier the slots were still available at major metro airports like Mumbai and Delhi, which is not the case now. With more aircraft coming into services in near future, there can not be a healthy level of growth in the industry," he had said.
According to a rough estimate, the country at present has around 300 aircraft and an ideal average addition annually should be about 30-35 aircraft. "But many more aircraft are being added and the key airports can not absorb them. In short, we will have more capacity than what the market requires," he had said.
As per a report by Ficci-KPMG titled 'India Aviation Report 2016', with 81 million trips, India's domestic aviation market grew at over 20.3% during January-December 2015, the highest growth rate recorded in the world. India is well on its way to become the third largest aviation market by 2020, the report said.
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