When the Go-ing gets tough

"The decision to suspend our operations at the Chennai airport is a part of our strategy to consolidate our leadership position within our network. We view this as part of a normal business process towards optimising current resources and slots," said GoAir Chief Executive Officer Edgardo Badiali.

GoAir stopped operations to Kochi last month, and it opted out of Pune and Coimbatore last year. As a result, the airline now operates only in nine sectors.

Industry sources said the carrier is also planning to rationalise its flights to Bangalore, by going for more long-haul domestic flights to the city. Sources also said the carrier is looking at increasing capacity to Hyderabad from cities such as Ahmedabad and Jaipur.

At least one travel portal said sales of tickets for GoAir on the Delhi-Chennai route has been very low. "GoAir's performance in sectors such as Delhi-Chennai had been very poor. Out of our total sales for Chennai, only 1-2 per cent was accounted for by GoAir, which is very dismal," said Mohit Srivastava, head of online sales, makemytrip.com.

Experts see this process as part of GoAir's survival strategy in a market, which is seeing a slowdown in traffic growth. "Their idea is to stick to very select sectors where they are performing well rather than spreading themselves too thin," said an industry expert.

Company statistics show that while the carrier was operating around 82 daily flights during the last year's winter, the number has now been cut down to 62 daily flights.

"Apparent reduction is mainly due to less connecting flights. Our attempt is to provide our passengers more point-to-point flights in our new schedule," said a GoAir executive.

Moreover as a result of cutting down capacity (7 aircraft to 6), the domestic traffic carried by the airline only grew by 4.24 per cent during the quarter of January-March 2008 over the same period last year, whereas the industry average growth was more than 11 per cent.

GoAir has also decided to go slow on the ordering of 20 more Airbus A320s in addition to the ones already ordered by the airline. GoAir had ordered 20 A320s in 2006.

Two of these new aircraft have already been delivered and the third will be delivered by June this year.