A series of heavy discount ticket offers by domestic carriers helped India’s air passenger traffic log a healthy 21.48 per cent growth in February over the same period last year, DGCA data shows.
Eight Indian carriers — three full-service, four budget and one regional — together ferried 122.61 lakh passengers during the reported period as against 100.93 lakh passengers flown by them in February last year, says data released by DGCA today.
Two of the eight airlines, however, commenced operations in June 2013, and January of this year.
Budget carrier IndiGo maintained its numero uno position as it cornered more than one-third of the market share (37.1 per cent), carrying 22.21 lakh passengers during the period.
In February, a total of 10.68 lakh passengers were flown by the national carrier Air India, while Jet Airways (excluding subsidiary JetLite) ferried 11.89 lakh passengers.
The number of passengers flown by the two other budget carriers — GoAir and SpiceJet — was 5.35 and 5.53 lakh, respectively.
Jet Airways had 19.8 per cent of the market share during the reporting month, while SpiceJet and GoAir could, respectively, corner 9.2 per cent and 8.9 per cent share of the overall traffic.
Air India’s total share in the February traffic stood at 17.8 per cent, the data said.
According to DGCA, airline seat factor has shown an increasing trend in February compared to the previous month due to the reduction of additional flights by airlines and distribution of load on existing flights.
During this period, Jet Airways and JetLite aircraft reported the highest seat occupancy at 89.5 and 89.7 per cent respectively, while newly launched Tata-SIA joint venture Vistara continued to struggle to fill seats with more than 41 per cent of them remaining vacant in February.
During the period, the overall cancellation rate for the scheduled domestic airlines stood at 0.60 per cent, which was on the lower side compared to earlier periods due to resumption of clear weather at airports in northern India, DGCA said.