Airlines in India continued to register record Load Factors as traffic grew 21.13% YoY and 29.31% MoM in data declared by DGCA for the month of July. A staggering 455.78 lakh passengers have flown from January to July in 2015.
Spicejet recorded third straight month of over 90% load factors clocking 93.4%, the highest in the three months, while Vistara continued to be lowest at 60.3%. It is ironic that the airline with highest load factors has the lowest On-Time performance (OTP) while the one with highest On-Time performance has the lowest Load Factors.
IndiGo gained back its crown on the On-Time performance front amongst pan India carriers recording 86.6% OTP, while the overall chart was topped by single aircraft operator Air Pegasus with 96.6%. Spicejet recorded 63.8% on the OTP front.
IndiGo, the largest carrier by market share also lost some market share and saw maximum drop from June to July in Load Factors. Both Jet Airways and IndiGo carried 51% more passengers than last July. IndiGo carried 24.17 lakh passengers in July 2015 compared to 16 lakh passengers in July 2014, while Jet Airways group carried 15.37 lakh passengers in July 2015 compared to 10.21 lakh in the same month last year.
Jet Airways and IndiGo remain at logger heads at Mumbai and Delhi, key cities for both of them with IndiGo having 32% of all domestic departures at Delhi while Jet Airways having 24% share, both having increased the departures 22% over last July and now at 3322 and 2506 respectively. The story is different at Mumbai, where Jet Airways leads with 36% of domestic departures while IndiGo has 31%, but the later has grown 27% over the last year as compared to 21% of Jet Airways. IndiGo recorded 2740 domestic departures out of Mumbai compared to 3201 of Jet Airways in July 2015.
On Time Performance
All airlines continued to struggle with On Time Performance at the four metro airports for which data is declared. While the loads have gone up over last year, this entire year, the OTP has been lower than previous year.
While some of this can be attributed to Air Traffic Congestion at Mumbai, which sees severe delays and looks like a fall out of increased traffic.
Market Share
After many months of continuous sliding, Air India saw an increase in market share over previous month is back to 16.2%, while Jet Airways also saw an increase over the previous month. It was market leader IndiGo which saw a drop of 2.6% in its market share recording just 35.8% in July. Spicejet had a marginal growth, while Air Asia India remained flat which was on expected lines. Also to see a drop in market share was Go Air which has reduced pilots owning to speculated pilot shortage in July and August 2015.
Next month
There should be a noticeable increase in On Time Performance of Spicejet which has recently got back 2 B737-900s. However, the wet leased A319s will leave the fleet before the winter schedule which would mean no net addition in count of aircraft but addition in seats.
Vistara should see a marginal increase in Load Factors in August going by their pricing while Jet Airways & IndiGo will hold their fort well. Go Air will also see a reduction in market share as more flights are cancelled in August than in July.
NetworkThoughts 