IndiGo beats Air Deccan as largest low-cost airline

IndiGo beats Air Deccan as largest low-cost airline

September 12, 2008, 0:08 IST

IndiGo, the Delhi-based, low-cost carrier, has ended Air Deccan’s five-year reign as the largest low-cost carrier in the industry. The change took place in August, just before full-service carrier Kingfisher Airlines erased the Air Deccan brand.

Air Deccan, which was renamed Simplifly Deccan after the merger with Kingfisher last year, is now called Kingfisher Red.

According to the data released by the civil aviation ministry today, IndiGo’s market share is 10.3 per cent, while that of Air Deccan trailed behind at 10.2 per cent.

Last month, Air Deccan was still the largest low-cost carrier, accounting for 11.3 per cent of the market, while IndiGo had a market share of 10.5 per cent.

The decline in Air Deccan’s market share has widened the gap between the market share of the Deccan-Kingfisher combine and the Jet-Jet Lite combine in August.

Building on the July trend, during which the Jet-Jet Lite combine had reinforced its position as the largest Indian carrier in terms of passengers, the carriers had a combined market share of 33.5 per cent, while the Kingfisher-Deccan combine was far behind at 25 per cent in August.

The change in dynamics, which ousted Air Deccan as the market leader among LCCs, primarily happened due to a change in the load factors of the airlines.

According to the ministry figures, Air Deccan had the lowest loads of 39 per cent in August, while IndiGo managed to garner the industry average load of 62 per cent.

“Another reason for this (change in market share) was that apart from the capacity cut already announced by Air Deccan for the summer schedule, Kingfisher had started selling a lot of Air Deccan’s inventory (seats) under its own brand right from July. So an Air Deccan ticket would be booked under Kingfisher’s ticket code, but passengers would actually be booking tickets for and travelling on an Air Deccan flight. This showed that Kingfisher was deploying more capacity than it actually did,” said Mohit Srivastava, the head of online sales of travel portal Makemytrip.com.

According to their revised schedules submitted to the civil aviation ministry in June, Air Deccan accounted for around 10 per cent of the capacity cuts, while those for Kingfisher were 4 per cent.


Source: http://www.business-standard.com/