GoFirst, SpiceJet, and AirAsia lost market share to Air India, Vistara, and IndiGo in June according to the Directorate General of Civil Aviation’s (DGCA) report.

As Indian carriers enter into the lean period, the passenger traffic has seen a drastic dip from May to June. As per the data, around 1.05 crore domestic passengers travelled by air in June, approximately 12.5 per cent lower than the 1.2 crore who travelled in May.

Lower PLF

Effectively, all the players saw lower passenger load factors (PLF) except for Alliance Air, which saw an increase of 1.9 per cent on PLF. On the other hand, FlyBig flew almost half empty flights with only 54.2 per cent of its flights being full. Except for SpiceJet, Vistara and Star Air, which had over 80 per cent of their flights full, Air India, GoFirst, and IndiGo carried 75 per to 78 per ent full flights. 

However, despite carrying most passengers, SpiceJet lost market share. AirAsia and GoFirst too lost market share. On the other hand, Vistara, IndiGo and Air India gained market share. 

SpiceJet lost about 0.5 per cent market share, whereas GoFirst lost 1.6 per cent and Air Asia lost 0.4 per cent. On the other hand, Vistara gained 0.8 per cent, IndiGo gained 1.4 per cent and Air India gained 0.4 per cent. 

When BusinessLine asked Ameya Joshi, an independent analyst, who is also the founder of NetworkThoughts, an aviation consulting firm, he explained that market share is a function of capacity. “An airline has better chances of gaining market share when it has more flights. If an airline doesn’t deploy as many flights as it has been approved to fly, it may lose market share.”

In this case, there have been multiple reports of SpiceJet not deploying enough capacity due to the unavailability of spares, similarly, GoFirst too hasn’t been deploying enough aircraft due to a lack of engines for multiple aircraft.