IndiGo, India’s largest carrier by fleet and domestic market share, is rejigging its operations to Abu Dhabi. The rejig comes at a time when for the umpteenth time, Sir Tim Clark has made statements about India not increasing seats to Dubai. While this is a regular feature, news reports indicated that Etihad, too, thinks that it’s time to restart negotiation of bilateral rights revision.
There are various ways of comparison, which includes frequencies, capacity (by ASK) and seats on offer. Traditionally, Capacity by ASK has been the true measure while calculating capacity. However, since the bilaterals are based on seats, this post focuses on seats as the measure. The India – UAE bilateral agreement is complex, since there exists separate agreements within the UAE and also with options for spillover. Since the document is not in public domain, this post will not cover the bilateral aspects.
Data for this post has been obtained from Cirium, an aviation analytics company and is exclusive for this website. The shortest flight between India and UAE is between Ahmedabad and Sharjah operated by Air Arabia, while the longest is between Kolkata and Abu Dhabi, operated by Air Arabia Abu Dhabi.
IndiGo’s changes
IndiGo is adding thrice a week service to Abu Dhabi from Bhubaneshwar and four times a week from Vizag. The services are effective June 12 and June 13 respectively. The airline is also connecting Abu Dhabi with Madurai with thrice a week service from June 13. The airline is reducing frequency between Kochi and Abu Dhabi to Daily from 10 times a week, a reduction of three flights a week.
Effectively, IndiGo is adding seven more flights per week to Abu Dhabi as compared to the current schedule.
India – UAE
There are 2.7 lakh seats each way per week between India and UAE. At 61,268 seats each way each week, Emirates offers the maximum seats between the two countries. At 131,739 seats per week, Dubai sees the maximum seats on offer and includes carriers from both sides. Abu Dhabi comes in second with 90,328 weekly seats. The top three airlines between India and UAE are Emirates, IndiGo and Air India Express.
Let’s break down at airport level now,
Dubai is connected to 22 points in India, Abu Dhabi and Sharjah connected to 21 points in India, Ras Al Khaimah to five, Fujairah to two and Al Ain to just one.
The question then is why is Etihad / Abu Dhabi pushing for more seats to India? The seats are all utilised from the Abu Dhabi side, but on the face of it, it looks like there are seats available on the Indian side. The answer to that may lie into the larger seats deployed between India and the UAE.
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