New flight plan: Thanks to Covid, Bharat gains altitude as India loses height

New Delhi: Indian carriers are seeing route profiles evolve thanks to Covid-19, with smaller cities generating more business than they used to, said airline executives and experts. Air travel between the top cities meanwhile has declined. The country’s airlines have traditionally pegged their revenue strategy on flights between the big metros, with Delhi-Mumbai being the busiest. While that’s still No. 1, there are now more flights than in pre-Covid times on routes such as Delhi-Srinagar, Mumbai-Varanasi, Kolkata-Jaipur, Delhi-Jabalpur and Ahmedabad-Patna among others.The data also show that key routes such as Delhi-Mumbai, Delhi-Bengaluru, Delhi-Chennai and Mumbai-Kolkata have seen a reduction in flights of as much as 63 per cent from pre-Covid levels. Aviation consultancy firm ICF tabulated the numbers by analysing data from flightradar24.com.79672499The increase in demand for tickets to and from smaller cities is because of a rise in travellers who are abandoning trains because they perceive a higher infection risk. “We have seen trends that metro-to-non-metro or non-metro routes have picked up post Covid mainly because people who were travelling earlier on trains shifted themselves to air travel because of safety concerns. Hence, first-time travellers are helping drive growth,” said Nishant Pitti, CEO and cofounder of online travel portal EaseMyTrip.com.While Delhi-Mumbai is still the top-selling route, “we have seen sectors like Delhi-Ranchi/Patna and vice versa also among top 15 routes in the domestic market,” Pitti said.The Mumbai-Delhi-Mumbai route saw 1,431 flights in November compared with 3,842 in the year earlier. However, the number was higher this year for Bengaluru-Kolkata-Bengaluru. The data also shows that flights between tier 3 cities increased by 18 per cent but declined by 53 per cent between tier 1 cities in November from the year earlier.Riding the Mini-BoomIndian airlines are currently operating about 70 per cent of pre-Covid flight levels although the government has allowed them to go to 80 per cent — or about 2,500 flights per day. Carriers are riding the mini-boom as flights to smaller cities generate greater profitability, partly because of lower costs such as airport charges. “Recovery in the Indian domestic market is being led by tier 2 and tier 3 markets, which tend to generate the most profit margin for airlines even under normal circumstances,” said Piyush Bansal, operations lead at ICF in India. “Now that airlines have been restricted in capacity, they are happy to make reductions in highly competitive metro routes, of course, with a few exceptions.”

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