SriLankan Airlines to spread wings to 2 more Indian cities

SriLankan Airlines is soon set to extend its services to Ahmedabad and Kolkata, thereby taking the total number of cities that it serves to 12.

The airlines' decision comes close on the heels of a 30 per cent jump in traffic to 75,000 passengers to India in the first nine months of 2004-05, as compared a 23 per cent increase in traffic in its global operations during the same period.

Flights to Chennai, which account for the major portion of Sri Lankan Airlines' business to India, witnessed a 75 per cent increase in capacity. The weekly capacity to Chennai is about 10,000 seats.

Addressing a press conference here on Tuesday, G T Jayaseelan, head (commercial), Sri Lankan Airlines, said that the capacity to Chennai was increased by using aircrafts with a bigger capacity. The airlines is also studying the possibility of adding Coimbatore to its south Indian destinations.

Other than tourism, traffic to Sri Lanka is being driven by business related travelling. An airlines official said that the business related travelling took off about two years ago, and now makes up about 25-30 per cent of the total traffic. This traffic to Sri Lanka is driven by meetings, conferences and incentive-based visits.

Sri Lanka has begun to compete with other Asian destinations such as Bangkok to attract incentive-based travelling sponsored by Indian companies.

Tourism is the mainstay of Indian traffic to Sri Lanka. Jayaseelan announced that the airlines would soon unveil the re-launch of a tourism package to Sri Lanka, where the underlying concept would be 'Fall in Love Again'.

The tsunami which affected Sri Lanka did not have a significant impact on the traffic from India, said Jayaseelan. However, traffic originating from Europe and Japan dropped by about 50 per cent, he added.

The situation, however, began to improve recently in line with the Western governments lifting travel warnings to Sri Lanka, he said. He forecast that tourism to Sri Lanka would completely recover by October 2005.