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To double international transit passenger count, Tata Group-promoted Air India plans to further optimise its network by adding more overseas flight options and codeshare to destinations in South-east and Far East Asia as well as Europe and the continental US.
Besides new flights, Air India has recently retimed several of its flights to and from Europe, Australia, and introduced new flights to Southeast Asia to enable convenient connections for those travelling between these regions via Air India’s Delhi hub.
Even fresh investments have been made to strengthen the distribution network to make the airline’s inventory more widely available globally.
The move, said Air India’s Chief Commercial Officer Officer Nipun Aggarwal, will allow the airline to connect more international passengers from South-east and Far East Asia to Europe and the US.
One-stop connections
It will enable travellers from the US as well as London, Paris, and Frankfurt to easily take one-stop connections to Sydney and Melbourne in Australia and to points like Bangkok, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Ho Chi Minh City in South-east Asia via New Delhi.
Currently, the international-to-international (I-to-I) segment constitutes around 10 percent of its overall international passenger traffic.
Future plans
According to Aggarwal, Air India aims to double the size of the transit traffic segment over the next 2-3 years.
The strategy will allow Air India to capture a sizeable portion of an addressable market size, 130 million I-to-I passenger traffic that India can cater to every year.
This number is expected to grow to 200 million by FY35.
At present, the majority of this traffic is serviced by the Middle East-based airlines and hubs.
The process is also expected to transform Air India’s three major operational bases in Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru into mega international hubs.
Since 2022, when the Tatas took over Air India’s management, the airline has grown its transit traffic by almost 100 per cent.
From 2023 onwards, Air India has added new flights from Delhi to Milan, Copenhagen, Vienna, Amsterdam, and Zurich in Europe, which are complemented by new flights to Phuket, Ho Chi Minh City, and, most recently, Kuala Lumpur, along with frequency increases to Kathmandu, Colombo, Singapore, and Bangkok.
The airline has added partnerships with 15 new entities in the last three years, and the traffic on its partner network has grown by 2.5x.
Talks with Lufthansa
Furthermore, Air India would like to leverage Singapore as an external hub, he said while talking about the cooperation between the airline and its stakeholder, Singapore Airlines. Air India is also in advanced talks with Lufthansa for an expanded codeshare partnership, confirmed Aggarwal.
Meanwhile, on the domestic front, the airline has “ring-fenced” key metro-to-metro routes by deploying its new or upgraded products, some of which are from erstwhile Vistara.
He cited that Air India Express will focus on increasing its presence in the domestic and short haul international markets, and that the overlapping routes between Air India and Air India Express have been reduced on from fallen from 26 to 5 per cent on short-haul international routes.
Domestic flight frequencies hiked
While the overall flight capacity has grown by 1.3x since the takeover, the domestic flight frequencies have increased from 445 to 855 in the last three years.
In terms of business development, the airline has completely revamped its corporate product as well as its pricing structure. It had added 1,700 new corporate clients in the last three and started a new portal to cater to its SME clientele.
The airline now has a unified cargo business offering aircraft belly space on Air India and Air India Express aircraft.
As per Aggarwal, Air India has managed to increase outbound cargo load factor from 50 per cent to 90 per cent while inbound cargo load factor has increased from 30 per cent to around 45-50 per cent.
The overall cargo load factor has increased from 35 per cent to 55 per cent.
On the product side, Aggarwal said that the airline’s new first-class product is under development and will be deployed on international as well as domestic routes with Air India’s new A350-1000s.
Air India’s first-class product, he said, will be launched as part of the airline’s new wide-body fleet. It will offer high-net-worth individuals an alternative to private jets on long-haul routes like Delhi to London, New York or San Francisco.
Additionally, the new 777s will have more business class seats in the future.
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Published on January 12, 2025
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