Air passenger traffic takes a hit on high fares

For the first time in the past three years, the first week of July has seen the domestic air passenger traffic declining by 4 per cent over the year-ago period. After slowing down to a single digit in the past few years, the passenger traffic slipped into the negative zone this month.

"There has been a decrease of 5-6 per cent in the first eight days of July for full-service carriers compared with that in the same period of 2007," said Ankur Bhatia, executive director, Bird Group, which controls Amadeus India, one of the leading technology providers to the Indian travel industry.

Amadeus provides one of the largest ticket reservation platforms for the airline industry in the country.

Apart from full-service carriers, executives of low-cost carriers like JetLite and Simplifly Deccan confirmed that their numbers had gone down. Experts said taking a marginal growth of SpiceJet and IndiGo into account, the overall passenger traffic would go down by close to 4 per cent for the industry in the July.

According to figures released by the civil aviation ministry, the domestic passenger traffic in the country had seen a double-digit growth in the first quarter of 2008.

The growth in the first quarter of this calendar year was 11.12 per cent over the same period last year. The growth fell to a single digit in April compared with 8.65 per cent growth in the same month last year.

The growth in May came down to 2.9 per cent over the previous year's.

The ministry figures for June have not been compiled yet, experts and airline executives said, adding that the negative growth would have started in the last week of June.

The decrease has happened primarily because of two reasons