 "Tiger Airways seeks India partner")
The Airline has said India is an exciting market and it is planning to expand its services in the country.
Kaneswaran Avili, commercial director, Tiger Airways said that “we are definitely not aggressively looking at it (strategic partnership. We have a couple of offers knocking on our door not only in India, but also in many other markets but I think our priority now is to strengthen our position in our current market and potentially look at a few other hubs in other parts of Asia before looking at India”.
He added, “in India we basically look at strengthening our position in terms of airport facilities and also potentially looking at doing another strategic alliance with another partner in India”.
According to Avili, think will be something new cause most LCC's have not done and it requires a lot of studies, analysis. Once it completes the study and analysis we know whats the scope of partnership we can do and we use that as a platform to go and talk to the partners who are interested in talking to us.
It wont be a joint venture, it will be more like a strategic partnership like what the Airline has done with Scoot in Singapore. Scoot is basically a long haul LCC. “We do an interline agreement with them but in India we are looking at doing a Much more wider scope,” he said.
While declining to comment further, he said, India is an exciting market, because there is always ups and downs. The travel industry is always affected by various factors from health, weather, economy fuel prices all these provide challenges for aviation but over the years despite all these challenges aviation industry has continued to grow and will continue to grow.
The challenges for Airlines is to reduce their cost, basically through internal management, along with the support from the Government and the support from other stakeholders including airports. Despite all this demand has to grow and that will grow the industry.
The Airline is looking to expand to places like Kolkata, Madurai and Coimbatore for a start, he said.
Meanwhile, the company has announced a new tariff from six Indian cities to Singapore, which will be on par with a second class AC train fare from Chennai.
Chennai to Singapore, the Airline announced promotional offer of just $50 or Rs 2700, inclusive of all taxes. The current fare to Singapore is around Rs 8,000.
This is a promotional offer from Tiger Airways to celebrate five years of its Indian operations. The rider is that there will be only 10 seats to grab in each flight.
The low cost carrier will offer the promotional fares for sale from March 7 to 13 for travel between July 1 and November 13.
The Airline, which started its operations in October 2007 has carried over 1.4 million travellers between Singapore and India.
With its A320 type aircraft, it connects Singapore with Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderbad, Kochi, Thiruvananthapuram and Tiruchirapalli.