Air passenger traffic continued to soar, even as airlines improved their yields — net revenue per seat — on better demand for air travel in recent months.
Since June this year, the domestic airline industry has witnessed year-on-year growth in air passenger traffic after it spiralled down in later half of last year and first six months of this year.
The air passenger numbers published by the ministry of civil aviation on Tuesday show that 9.09 lakh or 21.8% more people took to the sky in November this year, compared to the same month last year.
According to the ministry data, local airlines carried 38.98 lakh passengers last month, compared to 30.48 lakh passenger during the same period last year.
However, compared to October — when domestic carriers flew 39.69 lakh passengers — November saw a drop of 1.78% in passenger numbers.
Ankur Bhatia, managing director of Amadeus, attributed the month-on-month slip in air traffic to seasonality and higher fares.
“Fares have firmed up in the last two months and could be one of the reasons for the slight fall in passenger traffic. The other reason is that November is usually a leaner month compared to October,” Bhatia told DNA.
And as fares moved up, many airlines — Jet Airways, JetLite, Kingfisher Airlines, SpiceJet and GoAir - saw their seat factors tumble. Meanwhile, seat factors of Air India (domestic), Paramount Airways and IndiGo increased in November.
Bhatia said the lower seat factors was not a cause for worry: “With fares flying, break-even load factors of airlines have also come down,” he said.
In terms of marketshare, the Naresh Goyal-owned airlines Jet and JetLite maintained their lead with a 27% share, even though it was down from 27.7% in October. The second largest airline, Kingfisher, saw its share increase from 20.7% to 21.1%. Air India and IndiGo also increased their marketshare to 18.6% and 14.1%, from 18.6% and 13.6%, respectively.
SpiceJet and Paramount Airways both lost marketshare — to 12.2% and 5.3% from 12.4% and 5.4%, respectively.
This month, the ministry for the first time published capacity and demand data of the industry, which indicates that airlines have put out more capacity (available seat per km) in the market this year compared to last year from July onward.
The swell in the industry capacity had come immediately after the upswing in demand (revenue passenger km) in June, when, for the first time this year, it had moved into positive zone.
The overall on-time performance (OTP) of domestic airlines for November was 74.5%, with Paramount leading with an OTP of 85.9% followed by Kingfisher at 82.5%.
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