Domestic airlines traffic grew 95.7% year-on-year in January; Rakesh Jhunjhunwala-backed Akasa Air continues to gain market share

 

On a month-on-month basis, the air traffic declined by about 1.52%. In terms of passenger load factor, all airlines registered a month-on-month decline.

Domestic airlines registered a growth of 95.72% in air traffic with 125.42 lakh passengers in January 2023 as against 64.08 lakh passengers carried in the same month a year ago. However, on a month-on-month basis, air traffic declined by about 1.52%. In terms of passenger load factor, all airlines registered a month-on-month decline.

In December 2022, domestic airlines carried 127.35 lakh passengers.

According to the latest DGCA data, IndiGo's passenger load factor (PLF) in January 2023 was 82%, compared to 87.5% in the previous month. Air India's PLF stood at 87.5% versus 89.3% in December last year. SpiceJet's PLF also fell to 92.7% versus 91% in the previous month.

Meanwhile, Air India's other parent-backed airlines Air Asia and Vistara reported PLFs of 87% and 89.4% in January 2023, compared to PLFs of 89.8% and 91.9%, respectively, in January 2023. New entrant Akasa Air also saw its PLF fall to 82.8% in the month under review, as against 83.8% in December last year. Like other airlines, Go First also posted a PLF of 90.9%, lower than the previous month's 92.6%.

Furthermore, the data showed that the overall cancellation rate for scheduled domestic airlines for January 2023 stood at 1.41%. This has increased from the cancellation rate of 0.79% in December last year.

In January this year, among the many reasons for cancellation, weather accounted for a majority of 86.5%, followed by a commercial and technical issue with 5.8% and 4.8% respectively. Miscellaneous causes accounted for 2.3%.

Also, a total of 418 passenger related complaints were received by scheduled domestic airlines. The number of complaints per 10,000 passengers in the month of January 2023 has been around 0.33.

DGCA also highlighted the on-time performance (OTP) of scheduled domestic airlines for the four metro airports. Bangalore, Delhi, Hyderabad and Mumbai. Among these four cities, IndiGo has the highest on-time performance of 84.6%, followed by Akasa Air at 76.9%, Vistara at 76.6% and Air India at 75.7%. The OTP of Air Asia, SpiceJet and GoFirst stood at 61.1%, 58.9% and 50.7% respectively.

As on January 31, 2023, IndiGo has a market share of 54.6% --- maintaining its leadership in the sector. Air India stood second with a market share of 9.2%, while Vistara stood third with a market share of 8.8%. Go First has a share of 8.4% in the fourth position. Air Asia and SpiceJet had a market share of 7.4% and 7.3%, respectively. Akasaka Air's market share increased significantly to 2.8%.

On a month-on-month basis, Akasaa Air's market share increased from 2.3% in December last year. Rakesh Jhunjhunwala-backed Akasa Air has a market share of 1.8% in the fourth quarter of 2022. Overall, in 2022, the market share was just 0.6%.

Akasa Air took off from Mumbai's Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport on August 7 last year.