Heading into 2017, Changi Airport will be offering more flight options for travel to India. A total of 13 weekly services will be introduced by the end of the year, representing an addition of nearly 2,300 weekly one-way seats to India.
Presently, India is Changi Airport’s seventh largest country market, accounting for 6.1 per cent of the airport’s total passenger traffic. For the first 10 months of this year, passenger traffic to and from the India market rose five per cent year-on-year to reach 2.94 million movements. For the month of October, India had the strongest year-on-year growth (over 12.4 per cent) among Changi’s top 10 country markets. In 2015, Changi Airport saw a record 3.43 million passengers travelling between Singapore and India.
Riding on the travel demand on routes to India, Indian carriers will be injecting capacity to the cities of Kolkata, Chennai and Bengaluru. From November 20, Air India Express has launched 4x weekly services to Kolkata. It will also step up its Chennai services, newly-launched in October, from 5x weekly to daily services. Meanwhile, Jet Airways will be launching a new daily Singapore-Bengaluru service from December 14; this follows after the airline boosted capacity by switching to a widebody aircraft for its daily Singapore-Mumbai flights earlier this year.
Since the beginning of this year, Changi has welcomed two new city links to India – Amritsar and Jaipur – both operated by Scoot, which is a new entrant into the India market. With new routes, increased frequency of services and upgauging of various aircraft this year, seat capacity on India routes has also seen a year-on-year increase of 20.3 per cent.
Changi is connected to 15 cities in India, with flights operated by nine airlines. Singapore is a popular transfer hub for travellers between India and Australia, and between India and Indonesia.
Lim Ching Kiat, managing director – air hub development, Changi Airport Group, said, “India is one of Changi Airport’s key country markets, and amid close bilateral relations between Singapore and India, we have seen growing travel demand from the market. The positive growth momentum has continued in 2016, and going forward, the addition of new flights from Singapore to more Indian cities is going to drive this further. We will continue to work with our airline partners to develop routes to the Indian subcontinent, providing more flight options for our passengers at Changi Airport.”
