India’s domestic air traffic rises 29.3% in July

India’s domestic air traffic rose 29.3% in July compared to the previous year – one of the highest levels of growth witnessed in the last several months.

This comes at a time when the airlines are offering cheaper tickets to passengers due to fare wars. Primarily helped with a significant drop in the global oil prices, airlines are selling tickets at lower prices and filling up more seats.

However, in July, only national carrier Air India and private carriers Jet Airways, SpiceJet and Vistara saw a rise in occupancy compared to the previous month of this year.

Jet Airways piped both IndiGo and AirAsia in this category even as SpiceJet witnessed the highest occupancy of 93.4%.

Low-cost carrier IndiGo continued to dominate the market in July with a market share of 35.8%. However, it’s share was down from 38.4% in June.

Jet Airways, along with its subsidiary JetLite, saw the highest rise in the market share from 21.1% in June to 22.8% in July. Also, the market share of SpiceJet has been consistently increasing over the past few months and it stood at 12.3% in July, a slight rise from 12.1% in the last month.

Air India’s market share also rose by almost a percent to 16.2%.

The domestic carriers together carried 6.74 million passengers compared to 5.21 million passengers last year.

Vistara topped the chart for on-time performance with 93.5% punctuality record followed by Indigo (86.6%), AirAsia (86.3%) and Jet Airways (80.4%). SpiceJet’s on-time performance stood poorly at 63.8%.

Both SpiceJet and Jet Airways, which released their first quarter results recently, swung back in profits helped primarily by decline in the air fuel prices. With the oil prices continuing to fall, airlines expect this quarter to be profitable too. Almost all the airlines offered discount schemes to passengers in the past few months.