MUMBAI: When was the last time a Friday afternoon online search for a flight next morning to London and return showed a total fare of just Rs 46,000? On Friday, Turkish Airlines offered exactly that with a 75 minute layover in Istanbul. Generally in March, Mumbai-London return fares on direct flights would cost over Rs 80,000 just 24 hours in advance.
\nOn Friday, you could have also booked a Delhi to New York flight, fly out with a cabin bag and land in the US before Saturday midnight (local time) and return after Holi for as little as Rs 58,000. In March any other year, such a last-minute trip would cost over Rs 80,000.
\nIn the \u201cextraordinary circumstances\u201d that international airlines find themselves in, under the cloud of Covid-19, even dirt cheap fares are finding only few takers. So, when a Singapore flight took off from Mumbai this week, the 256-seater plane had just 25 passengers. Similarly, a London-Mumbai flight landed in the city with only 60 passengers in economy class. The coronavirus outbreak has hit airline bottomlines like nothing has in the past two decades since 9\/11, say industry insiders.
\nBesides East Asian destinations, flights to West Asia, such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi, have also been hit severely. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
MUMBAI: When was the last time a Friday afternoon online search for a flight next morning to London and return showed a total fare of just Rs 46,000? On Friday, Turkish Airlines offered exactly that with a 75 minute layover in Istanbul. Generally in March, Mumbai-London return fares on direct flights would cost over Rs 80,000 just 24 hours in advance. On Friday, you could have also booked a Delhi to New York flight, fly out with a cabin bag and land in the US before Saturday midnight (local time) and return after Holi for as little as Rs 58,000. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[220,130,137],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-340914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-civil-aviation-the-times-of-india","category-newspapers","category-the-times-of-india"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=340914"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340914\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=340914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=340914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=340914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}