- Kozhikode continues to have the largest international presence of Air India Express
Air India Express is back in news and this time for withdrawing flights from points in Kerala. This created an uproar to an extent that Trivandrum MP Shashi Tharoor met senior Air India officials to protest and discuss. As we get closer to the start of Winter schedule 2025, which begins on October 26, 2025, this is a good time to look at what exactly changed for the international network of Air India Express.
Data for this post has been sourced from Cirium, an aviation analytics company and is exclusively provided for Network Thoughts. As of September 2025, Air India Express was operating 447 weekly international flights from India. Come November, this number drops to 393, a reduction of 54 weekly flights and 11338 weekly seats. With the average seats per plane nearly same, it made sense to look at the frequencies alone than both frequencies and seats.
What has the airline done?
Air India Express, a fully owned subsidiary of Air India, traditionally had a network largely originating in South India in general and Kerala in particular. Under the government, the airline had its head quarters in Kochi, which is now co-located with parent Air India in Gurugram.
Air India Express is rejigging its network this Winter, which involves a significant change to its international network. This sees the airline withdraw a large chunk of services from Kerala, viz. Kozhikode, Kannur, Trivandrum and Kochi; while adding services from Bengaluru and making it the de-facto hub.
The shift in departure is depicted in the chart below,
Bengaluru is the net gainer with an addition of 13 additional flights each week, while Kozhikode loses 22, Kannur 18, Trivandrum 16 and Kochi 15. Chennai also sees a reduction of 14 flights. The comparison of international departures from these airports in November vs September gives another dimension to this change.
Despite the changes, the top international station for Air India Express continues to be Kozhikode with 63 weekly departures, followed by Kochi at 41 weekly departures. The airline will not have any international departures from Chennai post this change.
How does it look from foreign port?
There is a significant reduction of flights to Dammam (-22 weely), Abu Dhabi (-19 weekly) and Muscat (-10 weekly), where as Bangkok sees an increase in flights. The airline is withdrawing from Salalah and closing the station. Salalah is the second airport in Oman.
Network Thoughts
Air India Express has added and cancelled multiple sectors over the last two seasons on the domestic front. With international, there hasnt been a smooth sailing with flights to Bangkok being adjusted time and again. Flight adjustments are fairly normal but this quickly in the cycle is an indicator of a home work not well done or a larger play with parent Air India.
This is a major change which the airline is doing on international sectors and sees focus on Bengaluru, the stated third hub of Air India which now seems be more of Air India Express rather than Air India and also certain cities like Lucknow.
The focus clearly seems on optimising the network, dropping routes where it is hard to make money or are seasonal in nature and make those points a spoke for one of the hubs; drop a sub optimal station like Salalah; consolidate the operations rather than scatter them. A lot of this could also be linked to the fleet mix it has, with A321s, A320, A320neo, B737NG and MAX8, their ability to fly specific routes, the crew trainings and pairings amongst others. The true single class, multi aircraft LCC model in India is now history.
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