The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) declared the traffic statistics for March, coming just days after the country recorded its highest post COVID passenger traffic which led to crossing of 4 lakh passenger mark for the first time since restart of civil aviation.
March saw Aviation Turbine Fuel (ATF) at new highs, which have carried forward to April but the traffic remained resilient reaching 1 crore 6 lakh passengers (106.96 lakh). The Holi weekend aided the traffic, though it took the long weekend of Ambedkar Jayanti, Easter and Ram Navmi to inch past the four lakh mark.
The market dynamics remain more or less the same. SpiceJet topped the load factor charts and clocked 86.9% load factor. It was followed by Vistara at 86.1%, Air India at 85% and the trio of LCCs AirAsia India, IndiGo and Go FIRST at 81.3%, 81% and 81.4% respectively.
Read: Battle for second place heats up in Indian skies as February registers 20% sequential growth
On the market share front, IndiGo managed to continue with its 50% + market share garnering 54.8% market share, gaining a bit over the previous month. The airline had lost a significant share in February over January. The coveted second spot in terms of market share was taken over by Go FIRST at 9.8%, SpiceJet was relegated to third spot again with 9.5% market share.
TruJet – which had talked about investments coming in – did not carry any passengers in March.
OTP and Popular Routes
The On Time Performance across airlines continued to be good except for Alliance Air – the only government owned airline. IndiGo topped the charts with 93.9% OTP at four major airports and was followed by Go FIRST at 93%. Vistara, AirAsia India, Air India and SpiceJet were closely spaced at 91.9%, 91.3%, 91.2% and 90.4% respectively.
Return of traffic has also meant that certain routes saw seats sold in the highest fare brackets. Below are the airlines and sectors where the airlines sold over 1% of their seats in highest fare brackets. Data shows that flights to Srinagar and Leh, followed by those to Port Blair were the most popular with fares hitting the roof in some cases.
Air India
Kolkata – Port Blair
Delhi – Leh
Delhi – Patna
Delhi – Srinagar
Chennai – Port Blair
IndiGo
Bengaluru – Mumbai
Mumbai – Hyderabad
Kolkata – Port Blair
Delhi – Hyderabad
Delhi – Leh
Delhi – Srinagar
Chennai – Port Blair
Go FIRST
Bengaluru – Mumbai
Mumbai – Srinagar
Kolkata – Guwahati
Kolkata – Port Blair
Delhi – Hyderabad
Delhi – Leh
Delhi – Srinagar
Chennai – Port Blair
SpiceJet
Mumbai – Srinagar
Kolkata – Port Blair
Delhi – Leh
Delhi – Srinagar
Vistara
Kolkata – Port Blair
Delhi – Hyderabad
Delhi – Leh
Delhi – Patna
Delhi – Srinagar
AirAsia India
Bengaluru – Mumbai
Delhi – Srinagar
Q1 comes to and end
The Q1 of CY2022 closed with a market share of 53.9% for IndiGo. This was followed by SpiceJet at 10.2%. In terms of passengers, the two listed airlines IndiGo and SpiceJet carried 133.68 lakh and 25.21 lakh passengers respectively. This is 20% lower than the previous quarter for IndiGo, and about 9% higher than the previous quarter for SpiceJet.
For the month of March, LCCs carried 82.3% of all traffic while for Q1-CY22, the number stood at 81.3%.
Tail Note
March saw the season transition from Winter to Summer. While the approved schedule saw more flights than before, the actual operations have been subdued since then until the long weekend of April. The real holiday travel to look forward to would be May, provided the rising cases of COVID do not play the spoilsport.
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How do you know how many seats were sold in the top Y fare bracket?
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Number of seats can be deduced based on various parameters declared in DGCA data. It will still be an approximation
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