- Akasa Air’s first month of operations
- Vistara loses passengers and market share after a splendid July
- Air India records better OTP than IndiGo
The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) declared the traffic statistics for August this afternoon. Domestic air traffic crossed the 1 crore mark again with 1 crore 1 lakh passengers (101.16 lakh) flying in August 2022. This is an increase of 4.11 lakh passengers or 4.23%. August saw a higher number of passengers than July due to a few long weekends driving traffic. This was even as the month started with sub 3 lakh passengers per day and the last two days of the month also saw sub 3 lakh passengers per day.
Read: July 2022: Vistara ascends to the second spot for the first time
All eyes were on two things this month. The market share and load factors for Akasa Air in its very first month and the number two position in Indian skies with Vistara claiming it for the first time in July. Akasa Air opened its account with a modest 53% load factor and a market share of 0.2%. The market share will keep going up every month as it has a committed inflow of capacity coming in. The load factors, too, will see a jump as the network expands.
As for Vistara, the airline maintained its number two position in Indian skies but lost passengers after crossing the 1 million passengers a month mark in July. Infact, every other major airline gained passengers in August over July, except Vistara!
IndiGo lost 1.1% market share while Vistara lost 0.7% market share over previous month, SpiceJet lost 0.1%.This 1.9% was claimed by AirAsia India (1.2%), Go FIRST (0.4%), Akasa Air (0.2%) and Air India (0.1%). SpiceJet which was restricted to 50% of its operations and continues so in September did not see any major change in market share, while it carried more passengers than July.
With 77,179 domestic departures, airlines operated 1.4% more flights than July. On an average, there were 13,250 more passengers per day in August than the previous month. With a drop in market share from Vistara, the Full Service carrier v/s Low Cost carrier balance was 18.2% in favour of FSCs (18.8% last month, 16.8% in June)
Load Factor and Market Share
SpiceJet continued to lead the load factors charts albeit marginally with Vistara being neck to neck. SpiceJet recorded 84.6% load factors, while Vistara had 84.4%. Go FIRST recorded 81.1% load factor. Star Air (79.3%), IndiGo (78.3%), AirAsia India (74.9%), Air India (73.6%), Alliance Air (65.5%), Akasa Air (52.9%). Flybig recorded the lowest load factors at 50.2%.
AirAsia India made the most by adding 1.4 lakh passengers over last month. After Vistara crossed the 10% market share mark in July, it was back to no airline except IndiGo being in double digit market share. IndiGo cornered 57.7% market share, followed by VIstara at 9.7%, Go FIRST at 8.6%, Air India at 8.5%, SpiceJet at 7.9% and AirAsia India at 5.8%.
OTP and popular routes
AirAsia India continued its run at the top with 93.3% of flights at four metros being on-time. This was followed by Vistara (91.4%), Air India (87.9%), IndiGo (85.5%),SpiceJet (79.1%) and Go FIRST (74.9%). Alliance Air recorded lowest OTP at 72.1%
Delhi – Leh remained the prime route where airlines could sell fares in highest fare classes, in line with the season. This will change starting October with some weeks of September still seeing very good loads to Leh.
Outlook
September so far has been better than August and the traffic will only go up from here on until the end of December. With every passing day the number of active COVID cases are going down in India and that is leading to travel across business and leisure segments.
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