Mumbai headquartered Akasa Air has opened reservations for flights to Abu Dhabi. With daily flights commencing 11, July,2024; this will be the third international destination for the airline and the first in the UAE. The airline had announced flights to Jeddah which were advertised as its second destination and begin July 15. Interestingly, it then announced flights to Riyadh, which have already started – this becoming the second international destination after Doha. Now it turns out that Jeddah will not be the third destination and instead it would be fourth with Abu Dhabi coming online quickly with a limited sale window.
The flights will operate daily at below timings
QP584 BOM1705 – 1850AUH
QP585 AUH2005 – 0100(+1)BOM
Flights will operate daily and will be operated by the 737 MAX8 aircraft. Akasa Air is an all Boeing MAX operator.
Congested route
Abu Dhabi has a lot of attractions of its own, is the capital of the United Arab Emirates and also a bus or taxi ride away from Dubai – for which there are no rights left between India and Dubai to add more flights. India – UAE ( Abu Dhabi) bilateral was revised when Etihad invested in Jet Airways. That investment did not yield results for Etihad but that has left behind 50,000 seats per week each way – similar to Dubai. However, Dubai remains exhausted while there remains scope to add flights to Abu Dhabi with utilisation being somewhere around 73,000 seats after Akasa Air’s entry.
This still remains very heavy on the UAE side with Etihad and Air Arabia Abu Dhabi operating over 48,000 weekly seats while Indian carriers operate just short of 25,000 seats, nearly half of which are operated by IndiGo. Etihad is the largest carrier between India and Abu Dhabi.
The Mumbai – Abu Dhabi route will see Akasa Air compete with IndiGo (Double Daily), Etihad (four times a day) and daily flights of Air India Express and Vistara. Air India also has five times a week flights on sale for winter schedule, as of now. The Mumbai – ABu Dhabi route is the busiest amongst all routes to Abu Dhabi from India and that makes it a smaller task for Akasa Air in a way, since the additional capacity will be marginal. However, to compete against the might of a network carrier and others who would target the same market that Akasa Air wants to, will be a task.
Network Thoughts
The airline is adding international flights rapidly and in short duration with limited periods available to build up bookings. However, this could well be to justify its intent to operate all the routes which were allocated to it and additionally make it a case to ask for more routes.
Domestic routes have challenges with slots, while international routes come with challenges for slots and bilateral rights which slows down the process to an extent. The airline has not inducted an aircraft for four months now. A lot of its plans, which were publicly announced, have changed and one of that is the induction plan. It is not sweating its planes as other low cost carriers. As operations stabilise, this could also be a plan to increase utilisation.
Will it densify its network to the middle east or look for something towards the east and look for transfer passengers? There is hardly any airline which does not want to transfer passengers and Akasa Air will be no exception. Which routes then on the east would come up or would they? I would bet on something unconventional going by its network growth so far.
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