No takers for air seats to Port Blair

On Tuesday afternoon, Jet Airways flight 9W 614 took off from Port Blair for Chennai.

There was nothing unusual in the airline's plans except that the flight "" which is normally overbooked in November-February "" was operating at just 30 per cent capacity.

For the bean counters at Jet, it was a sharp jab in the bottomline as the sector is considered a lucrative one. In fact, the flight has been overbooked during the season for the past five years.

With the tsunami washing away the tourism industry in the Andaman & Nicobar Islands, the airlines operating from Port Blair are in course-correction mode.

Jet Airways is planning to reduce the number of its flights from February, while Air Sahara, which had drawn up plans to enter the sector by March-April, may well postpone its first flight connecting Port Blair with Chennai and Kolkata.

Indian Airlines is operating flights between Port Blair and Kolkata for the past 10 days with barely 20-35 passengers, blowing a huge hole in its bottomline.

Business is not good in the Port Blair-Chennai sector either."As the country's national carrier we have to absorb such losses. We are operating mainly because of our obligations and to transport urgent relief material and government officials," said an Indian Airlines official here on Tuesday.

There are no signs of an uptick on the horizon. "We have not seen a single tourist since December 28 on the Chennai and Kolkata sectors. Without enough passengers, meeting expenses at Veer Savarkar Airport is becoming difficult," said the official.

While Indian Airlines may have to continue operations, the private sector airlines are unlikely to keep taking hits. Jet may reduce the frequency of its Port Blair-Chennai service from daily at present to three or four flights a week.

"We are waiting for new orders from our headquarters in Mumbai as operating flights with 30-40 passengers does not make sense," said a Jet Airways executive.

The employee denies Jet is abandoning the islands. "Jet Airways had responded to the social cause by slashing fares in this sector by 50 per cent after the tsunami. Even then there are hardly any takers for the special concessional fare," he added.

An official here added that with the media in the final lap of its coverage, even journalists, will stop coming. The upshot: airlines will fly at barely 10 per cent capacity in the coming days.

However, the lieutenant governor of the Andaman & Nicobar Administration, Ram Kapse, held out some hope, saying the islands would be back on the tourist map. According to Kapse, in a few months the tourism sector may well start booming again, forcing the airlines to scramble back.