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Indian air travellers can now fly non-stop to Madrid, Vancouver and Brussels this winter as airlines launch new routes to tap leisure and business travel demand.
"We are seeing a good growth in our international business. Load factors are strong. We are launching a new non-stop service between Delhi and Madrid from December 1 and increasing frequency on the Delhi-San Francisco route. We are further looking to start many new routes next year," said Air India chairperson Ashwani Lohani.
India's international traffic rose 8.9 per cent to 49.8 million passengers in FY 2016 which is the second fastest growth in the last five years. Jet Airways, Air India and Emirates are the top three carriers on international routes from India in terms of market share.
Growing travel demand is attracting new airlines to India. According to sources, RwandAir is planning a one-stop service between Kigali-Mumbai, the first such link between India and the African country, while Garuda Indonesia Airlines too is exploring flights to Mumbai and Delhi.
Delhi, which handles about a quarter of India's international traffic, will have a new non-stop service to Vancouver (Air Canada) and Male (Mega Maldives Airlines) in the winter schedule. Flights to Seoul are increasing with a new service by Korean Air and additional flights by Asiana Airlines.
Service from Mumbai to Brussels and Beijing will resume in winter schedule with launch of flights by Air China and Brussels Airlines. The slot-constrained Mumbai airport is encouraging airlines to start new foreign routes by giving waiver in aircraft landing charges and has also reduced landing charges for wide body aircraft. Next summer Air Canada will start Mumbai-Toronto flights.
"For the upcoming winter season we will be increasing weekly frequency from 95 to upto 106 with more services during peak periods, " said Singapore Airlines general manager (India) David Lim. Singapore Airlines and its regional airline fly to 11 destinations in India. Its low cost arm Scoot recently launched flight to Jaipur while Jet Airways is starting Bengaluru-Singapore flight in December.
Thai Airways regional airline Thai Smile will connect Jaipur and Lucknow to Bangkok in winter.
"The growth in international traffic to and from India has been fairly secular – averaging around 8% per annum. Even in FY08-09 and FY12-13, when domestic traffic witnessed a decline over the previous year, international traffic grew around 5-6%. The next 3-4 years are likely to see the trend continue and may even cross the 10% mark like in FY 10-11," said Amber Dubey , partner and India head of aerospace and defence at global consultancy KPMG.
According to Dubey, the contributing factors to traffic growth are a growing economy, growing foreign investments, reasonably stable oil prices, increasing capacity deployment by global and Indian carriers and aggressive promotion of inbound tourism by the government. On the outbound side, rising disposable incomes, the aspirational value of foreign holidays and depreciation of the Euro and Pound are likely to have a positive impact, he said.
