Slight growth in domestic air traffic in April

After two consecutive months of slowdown, domestic air traffic witnessed a marginal growth with demand for travel going up by a little over 15 per cent in April over the year-ago period.
Indian carriers together flew 91.34 lakh passengers in April, 2017 as compared to 79.32 lakh passengers in the corresponding month of the previous year, as per monthly traffic data released by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) today.
After posting over 20 per cent growth in the domestic passenger market for 13 consecutive months till January this year, the demand for air travel dropped to 15.77 per cent in February and 14.91 per cent in March, respectively.

This marginal increase is due to the onset of the tourist season.
However, the demand between January-April period of this year rose 17.71 per cent compared to the same period last year with the total number of passengers at 309.35 lakhs.
Low-cost carrier IndiGo flew the maximum number of passengers at 37.79 lakh garnering 41.4 per cent of the total market share.

In terms of On-Time Performance (OTP), however, the market leader was pushed to the third sport with Tata-SIA joint venture Vistara claiming the top position at 87.4 per cent.
Another budget carrier SpiceJet once again witnessed the highest seat occupancy across its flights, registering 93.4 per cent load factor last month.

During the month, a total of 643 complaints were received from passengers, with the maximum against government-run Air India, followed by Jet Airways and its subsidiary JetLite.
Reacting to the traffic data, COO of travel portal Yatra.Com, Sharat Dhall, said, "We are confident that this trend of strong growth in the domestic aviation market will continue in the near to medium term".