India’s domestic travel demand in 2016 touched nearly 100 million mark, with the Indian airlines flying 99.88 million passengers between the January-December period of 2016 as compared to 810.91 lakh in 2015, recording an increase of 23.18 per cent. The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has said in its statistical analysis that traffic rose nearly 24 per cent in December 2016 to 95.52 lakh from 77.09 lakh registered during the same period in 2015, even as IndiGo continued to deliver poor on-time performance besides losing market share by almost two per cent in the month. The data showed that low-cost carrier SpiceJet had the highest passenger load factor during the month under review at 93.7 per cent.
“Not only have we scored a hat-trick with the best on-time performance (OTP) for the third consecutive month in a row, we have also recorded over 90 per cent passenger load factor for 21 successive months,” G P Gupta, chief administrative officer, SpiceJet, said in a statement.
The DGCA data showed that Gurugram-based IndiGo’s markets declined to 40.3 per cent in December last year as against 42.1 per cent in November 2016, despite carrying more number of passengers at 38.48 lakh in the month. Also, the airline’s OTP from four major private airports stood at a 61.6 per cent, whereas the rival SpiceJet delivered the best OTP for the third consecutive month at 70 per cent. SpiceJet was followed by budget carriers IndiGo and GoAir.
The data also showed that SpiceJet led the industry with 70 per cent punctuality rate at four major airports of Bengaluru, Delhi, Hyderabad and Mumbai. It was followed by Jet Airways and JetLite (64.3 per cent), Vistara (64.2 per cent), GoAir (63.6 per cent), IndiGo (61.6 per cent) and Air India (59 per cent) being on schedule.
Meanwhile, Air Costa had the highest number of cancellations at 13.65 per cent, followed by Air Carnival (12.03 per cent), Trujet (5.01 per cent), IndiGo (2.83 per cent), Air India (1.91 per cent), Jet Airways (1.77 per cent), SpiceJet (1.66 per cent), JetLite (1.40 per cent), GoAir (0.79 per cent), Vistara (0.40 per cent) and AirAsia India (0.11 per cent).
“The overall cancellation rate of scheduled domestic airlines for December 2016 has been 2.18 per cent,” the aviation regulator said.
The data disclosed that a total of 907 passenger related complaints was received in December. In terms of market share, IndiGo led the industry with the highest market share of 41.6 per cent followed by Jet Airways (15 per cent), Air India (13.3 per cent), SpiceJet (12.8 per cent) and GoAir (eight per cent). Vistara reported a market share of 3.2 per cent, followed by AirAsia India (2.8 per cent), JetLite (2.5 per cent), Air Costa (0.6 per cent), Trujet (0.4) and Air Carnival (0.1 per cent).
National carrier Air India increased its market pie by over one per cent to 14 per cent in December, having flown 13.35 lakh passengers during the month.
According to the DGCA data, the number of passengers flown by the 11 local carriers stood at 95.52 lakh in December 2016 as against 77.09 lakh a year ago, thereby registering a growth of 23.9 per cent. In November 2016, the passenger traffic rose by 22.45 per cent to 89.66 lakh.
(With inputs from Agencies)
