Turkish Airlines wants to add four new destinations in India for a larger share of Europe bound Indian traffic.
As of now, the carrier has daily flights out of Delhi and Mumbai to Istanbul and offers onward connections to European cities, North America, Latin America and Africa.
Temel Kotil, president and CEO of Turkish Airlines, said the airline has been seeking more destinations within India and will again approach Ministry of Civil Aviation. Senior ministry officials told DNA the Turkish Airlines’ request has been pending for two years. The airline wants to increase weekly flights from 14 at present to 46 from six cities in India, the official said.
“Turkish wants permission to fly from Hyderabad, Kolkata, Bangalore and Chennai. We are examining their request since this will involve redoing the bilateral agreeement and we may look at their request under sixth freedom traffic rights.”
Sixth freedom traffic rights refer to the right of Turkish Airlines to carry passengers or cargo from a second country to a third country via Istanbul. Kotil said more than 80% of Turkish Airline passengers from India are transit passengers. So what the ministry perhaps means is that it will examine Turkish Airlines’ request to carry transit passengers from India via Istanbul to onward destinations after taking into account interests of other Indian airlines. Air India is domestic code share partner to Turkish, selling 2 seats in business class and 10 in economy on each flight.
The CEO said the airline would also prefer rights to a twice daily service from Mumbai and New Delhi and permission to fly in different types of aircraft. The carrier currently flies A330-300 aircraft to India.
He admitted that European carriers such as Lufthansa, Air France and British Airways were Turkish Airlines’ competitors for Indian passengers to Europe and even Gulf carriers such as Emirates were “very strong” in India. On the issue of Air India joining global airline grouping Star Alliance, he said if that happens, Turkish would apply for free sale code share. This means the current limit on Air India selling Turkish tickets would be lifted.
Kotil said Turkish Airlines had 1.5% of the worldwide airline business and was the 17th largest airline in terms of fleet size and 8th largest in terms of destinations.
Comments