IndiGo, India’s largest carrier by fleet and market share, will add a new international destination – Mauritius to its network. The airline will operate four times a from Bengaluru to Mauritius starting November 19, 2024. This will be the 35th international destination for the airline.
6E1861 BLR0320 – 0745MRU
6E1862 MRU0930 – 1645BLR
Flights will operate four times a week (Tue, Thu, Sat, Sun) and the A320neo will be deployed on the sector.
Not that long ago in history, Air Mauritius operated a Mauritius – Bengaluru – Chennai – Mauritius flight. The India – Mauritius market currently sees Air Mauritius operate once a week service to Chennai, twice a week to Delhi, five times a week to Mumbai. Air Vistara also operates four times a week to Mauritius on the A321LRs from Mumbai, and will increase it to five in winter.
With timings similar to flights to Denpasar, Bali; IndiGo will not have to tweak the domestic connectivity, instead it will expand the offering from Bengaluru. The 5 hour and 55 minute flight is much shorter than its non-stop to Denpasar, Bali which is a seven hour flight. IndiGo seems to be cautious with the operations with the start being non-daily, unlike Bali. The expansion looked like a clear writing on the wall, after its expansion to various existing destinations from South India.
The island of Mauritius is towards the eastern coast of Africa and is created by volcanic activity. The country is a stable democracy, does not require visa pre-departure for Indians and is a tourist heaven. Over a period of time, the country moved from agrarian economy to a services led economy with tourism being a special focus area. This makes it the second African destination for IndiGo, which flies to Nairobi from Mumbai.
The eternal question – from where?
There are few destinations for which the origin is easy to select and then there are a few where multiple factors are at play. When IndiGo pulled out of Delhi – Singapore and Mumbai – Singapore, in the early years of its international operations, it launched Chennai – Singapore. The idea of not closing the station and instead relying on the densest and also a shorter route made sense. The logic has been reapplied for Kuala Lumpur. However, when it came to Indonesia – the airline chose Mumbai to launch flights to Jakarta and Bengaluruf for Bali. Bengaluru had the tech connection, but Mumbai had the trade connection along with middle east connectivity to transfer passengers. To Bali, Bengaluru had the holiday crowd, so did Mumbai – but more importantly, the longest narrowbody flight was possible from Bengaluru and not from Mumbai in terms of range.
When it comes to Mauritius, what were the options? Delhi was ruled out due to range, so it had to be Mumbai (end of range), Bengaluru or Chennai. Mumbai already sees heavy competition. There are enough indications to say that Vistara has not been able to crack the market effectively, like it did with Delhi – Denpasar. It tried tweaking its schedule a couple of times in the past and now goes head on with Air Mauritius with the timings. That leaves us with Bengaluru and Chennai. What works in favour of Chennai is the cultural integration with Mauritius, but what might have eventually worked in favour of Bengaluru is the large feed, seamless connections and an already present and working hub, which makes the identical timings like that to Denpasar – Bali a possibility without much adjustment.
Network Thoughts
IndiGo has given a upper single digit guidance in growth for the current quarter. It is a steep guidance because at the beginning of the quarter, IndiGo is up only 2.5% in capacity over Q2-FY24. The longer flights are going to add capacity much faster than the shorter domestic flights. Longer flights would potentially have a longer term positive effect on maintenance which will see fewer cycles and higher hours, which potentially helps balance the higher cycles and hours of domestic flights and getting the maintenance cycles in sync.
This will be the first Low cost operation to Mauritius and has the potential to stimulate the market, like how it happened with Male or Phuket – where it was Go Air as the first mover and IndiGo joining in later.
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