Despite delays, Air India grabs market share, passengers from private airlines in October

New Delhi: Air India, which was facing flak around Diwali with severe flight delays and cancellations, actually carried the maximum passenger loads across its aircraft in October.

According to data released by DGCA, aircraft occupancy across Air India’s domestic network was the best among all domestic airlines at 83.5 percent, followed by SpiceJet at 80.1 percent as market leader IndiGo languished at 76.8 percent and even AirAsia India flew with 76.2 percent occupancy.

In other words, while Air India had more than 8 in 10 seats full on its aircraft and SpiceJet was close behind, IndiGo and AirAsia India flew with almost one in four seats empty. This is surprising since October was the festival month and actually saw passenger traffic growth of 18.31 percent month on month to 59.25 lakh passengers.

During the Diwali week, passengers travelling on the Air India network actually faced much difficulty as many flights got delayed - some beyond two hours - or were clubbed with other flights. This also lead to offloading of some pre-booked passengers. Airline officials had expressed their helplessness then, saying engine trouble had grounded some aircraft creating capacity shortage.

Also, the rush on some days preceding and after Diwali followed by a lull on some intervening days lead to wild fluctuations in passenger load factors and hence some flights were clubbed or cancelled all together. So is the over 80 percent load factor figure for Air India in October actually also a function of capacity reduction which the airline had to do since some aircraft were grounded?

Not just aircraft occupancy, Air India also grabbed back some market share from private airlines to close October at almost a fifth or 19.5 percent share, something it had ceded to rivals since March. IndiGo continued to be the clear market leader despite low aircraft loads at almost 32 percent share; SpiceJet has been losing share for three months and settled in October at 17.3 percent.

The other LCCs - GoAir and Jetlite - together accounted for a 13.5 percent of the market last month. With Jetlite flying into history from 1 December, three national LCCs (IndiGo, SpiceJet and GoAir) will be left.

Air India, which saw maximum complaints from passengers on flight delays/cancellations among all airlines in October, had to pay close to Rs 1.8 crore in compensation. This compares rather poorly with IndiGo which did not pay a single rupee in compensation throughout the month despite having the worst cancellation record during the month. The DGCA statement explained this away, saying IndiGo cancellations were the highest because of floods in Jammu & Kashmir and in Andhra Pradesh.