Air India Express, the low cost subsidiary of Air India, has launched flights to Manohar International Airport, North Goa (MOPA) today. This is the 38th domestic destination for the airline. Air India Express will continue to operate to Goa – Dabolim. The airline has gone with full force, starting the new operations with double daily flights from Delhi, a daily each from Indore and Bengaluru along with six times a week service from Chennai. The airline will further augment its presence at Mopa with flights to Kuwait and Abu Dhabi starting in May, which will also see the airline operate flights from Hyderabad, which largely operate as an enabler for flights to Kuwait and Abu Dhabi as the airline does not have a base at Mopa (or Dabolim). When the international flights start, Air India Express will complement the international service offered by parent Air India, which operates the Dreamliner to London Gatwick, thrice a week. The airline operates to 16 international destination, a total of 54 destinations in May.
The new flights are a shot in the arm for GMR group as Mopa, which it operates, has been seeing negative growth over the last few months as more slots become available at Dabolim and airlines revisited their Goa operations after the initial barrage of flights.
In May, Goa – Mopa will be the 22nd most busiest airport for Air India Express with 38 domestic departures in May as per data shared by Cirium, an aviation analytics company exclusively for this blog post. Overall Goa – Mopa will be 32nd most busiest airport in the Air India Express network in May.
Bengaluru and Delhi the mainstay
Bengaluru and Delhi account for 11.6% and 9.5% of all departures for Air India Express. This is followed by Hyderabad at 6% and Kolkata at 4%. Interestingly Guwahati comes in fifth at 3.8%. With Air India calling out Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru as its three hubs, Air India Express continues to be strong at Bengaluru and Delhi, from where it has a presence on some metro routes but has a large focus on non-metro routes. The Bengaluru base is largely thanks to the erstwhile AirAsia India network which it inherited and tweaked.
Network Thoughts
Since the time erstwhile AirAsia India launched Lucknow, the airline then already under the Tata group and later as a merged entity have been following the “focus city” model largely followed in the western world. It is launching flights to stations where it can consolidate. Now it has the capacity and means to go strong.
It helps the market in more ways than one. The travel agents can sell more options and the sales team can offer better incentives; the cost of operations gets rationalised and lastly people have confidence in operations. However, it also means opening and closing a large number of routes in quick succession. How this pans out is for time to tell.
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