Air traffic grows 20% in Q4; March occupancy lower than in February

The country’s air passenger traffic rose by an impressive 20.57 per cent in the March quarter over the same period a year ago. However, the carriers filled less number of seats in March against February, according to the data released by the DGCA.

Nine Indian carriers together flew a total of 185.46 lakh passengers in the March quarter of the previous fiscal as against 153.81 lakh passengers ferried by them in January- March quarter of financial year 2013-14.  At the same time, the load factor of the domestic airlines in March this year has shown decreasing trend compared to previous month due to end of vacation period of various sectors, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) said.

On a month-on-month basis, domestic carriers ferried a total of 62.85 lakh passengers in March with budget carrier IndiGo carrying more than a third of this at 22.86 lakh passengers. This was followed by Jet Airways and its wholly-owned subsidiary JetLite, which together have flown 13.95 lakh passengers in the reporting month.

While national carrier Air India stood at a distant third as it transported a total of 10.60 lakh passengers in March 2015, the number of passengers ferried by GoAir and SpiceJet during this period stood at 6.90 and 5.31 lakh respectively. At the same time, Tata-SIA joint venture carrier continued to struggle to attract passengers in its three-class configuration-business, premium economy and economy with the airline flying just 53,000 passengers in March this year. Vistara had launched operations on January 9.

In terms of market share, while Indigo cornered 36.4 per cent of the total traffic in March, Jet Airways’ (excluding JetLite) pie during the reporting period stood at 20.56 per cent. Air India carried almost 17 per cent of the total traffic while SpiceJet and GoAir had 9.7 per cent and 8.8 per cent market share respectively in the reporting month.