Lockdown 4.0: Over 95% flight bookings for one-way trips, shows data

Over 90 per cent of flight bookings are for one-way trips and on non-metro routes, indicating little demand yet for business travel, shows the data from Cleartrip.

Domestic flight operations resumed on May 25 after a two-month suspension, allowing stranded people to return home.

Flight operations have also resumed in cyclone-hit Kolkata on Thursday.

“Over 75 per cent of bookings are for travel within two weeks of the booking date. Over 95 per cent are one-way tickets," said Balu Ramachandran, senior vice-president, Cleartrip.

He said only 10 per cent of bookings on the portal in the past few days were for metro to metro travel, while 90 per cent were from metro to non-metro and on non-metro to non-metro flights.

“We are seeing reasonable demand on some routes. We are happy to add more flights to fly people home and unite them with their loved ones. For some time, we see people undertaking only essential travel. Leisure and business travel may take a while to return,” said Vinod Kannan, chief commercial officer, Vistara.

Industry-wide average flight loads in the first four days of service resumption have been around 50-55 per cent. However, load factors have not been uniform.

For instance, 4,255 passengers left Mumbai and 1,328 arrived in the city in 50  flights on Thursday.

According to MakeMyTrip, travel between metro and non-metro routes has taken a lead over metro to metro routes.

A bulk of the bookings is being made for travel in the 0-10 day advance purchase bucket. A majority is for one-way travel only, it said. 

“While Mumbai-Varanasi, Delhi-Patna, and Mumbai-Delhi were the top-selling sectors when bookings opened on  May 21, over the past few days, we have seen  pick-up in Mumbai-Imphal, Bengaluru-Guwahati, Delhi-Srinagar, and Delhi-Imphal routes,” said MakeMyTrip.