 "Coimbatore-based LCC Air Carnival to start flying from July 18")
Air Carnival's maiden flight will take off on July 18. The airline plans to focus on short haul services with its ATR72-500. The promoters are infusing around $12 million to take three aircrafts on lease.
Manish Kumar Singh, chief executive officer, Air Carnival, told Business Standard that the airline said first flight will be on the Coimbatore-Chennai-Madurai sectors.
While it kept Re 1 as fare for the first flight, for the first three months it kept the tariff as Rs 999.
The airline will have daily services for 10 sectors, including three daily flights from Chennai to Coimbatore (up and down) and two daily flights from Chennai to Madurai (up and down).
The 70 seater aircrafts are more economical for short haul services, said Singh.
The airline will start with one aircraft and will add the second by September end and third by October. Once the new aircrafts are inducted, it will look at Bangalore, Tirupathi, Hubli and Trivandrum to expand.
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For the next one year, the company will focus on the Southern Indian market and later it will look at the Northern markets.
The airline said around 25-30% would be new routes, in which no other airline is operating.
For example, the airline is contemplating to start a service between Coimbatore and temple town of Tirupathi in Andhra Pradesh. Similarly, it is also planning to start a service between Chennai and Mysore.
The promoter CMC Group will infuse around $12-15 million (of which $5 million has already been invested) initially, which will fund to acquire atleast 3-5 aircrafts.
"Once we stablise, we will look to raise money from investors," said Singh, who is confident that the airline will break even in 2.5 years.
"This is the right time to start operations since demand is high and fuel prices have also dropped," said Singh. He noted, earlier fuel cost used to be around 50% of the total cost, which has now dropped to around 30-35%.
The airline is targeting around 80-85% load factor and target customers include first time travellers, business men, people who travel on holiday and leisure and others. "One class cannot fetch business fully, we need to target all types of travellers to have the load factor which we are targeting," said Singh.
Air Carnival is the sister concern of CMC (Coimbatore Marine College) Group of institution, established in 2002 in Coimbatore and is in the field of education for the last 12 years. S Irudaya Nathan, founder and director of CMC Group, established Air Carnival Charter Services, in New Delhi in 2013, offering charter services in India.
Increasingly, the southern market is becoming a hub for RScheduled Airlines. Religare Aviation had started one in the North, but it closed shop soon after opening due to poor demand.
Of all the new airlines, Vistara is the only one not based in the south. AirAsia India, Pegasus, Fly Easy, Air Carnival, TurboMegha's TruJet, and Air Costa are all based in the south. This is because of the promise the region holds.
Earlier, successful businessmen like Kalanathi Maran (promoter of Spicejet), Vijay Mallya (Kingfisher) and R Thiagarajan (Paramount Airways), who were successful in their original ventures, could not succeed due to various factors.
Among the five regions — north, west, east, north east and south — the southern region is the most lucrative market considering it has three metros, which is half of the total number of metros in the country.
Hyderabad and Bangalore are greenfield airports, better planned and this allows the new airports to support new airlines better through better infrastructure and sops. South has lucrative cities including Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Cochin and others. No other region is this attractive, says analysts.