Plan to double international transit traffic in 5-10 years: Air India exec

Says 'out-of-the-box thinking' needed to develop Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru as transit hubs

Air India plans to double the share of international transit traffic in international traffic from 4 per cent now to about 10 per cent in 5-10 years as part of its strategy to make three major Indian airports — Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru — key transit hubs, Chief Commercial and Transformation Officer Nipun Aggarwal said on Thursday.

According to aviation analytics firm Cirium, the share of transit traffic in Air India’s international traffic surged from 2.84 per cent in February 2023 to 5.2 per cent in February 2024.

International transit traffic refers to passengers who pass through a country en route to their destination in another country.

“We see this three-hub strategy working quite nicely for us in the future. Delhi would be our principal hub, which will enable D-to-I (domestic to international) and I-to-I (international-to-international) connectivity globally. Mumbai will be our secondary hub. And Bengaluru is our tertiary hub, primarily from the south of India,” Aggarwal stated at the CAPA India Aviation Summit 2024.

“Today, the focus is more on D-to-I, which is only 25 million passengers annually, but the I-to-I opportunity is also sensible. That itself is 14 million passengers annually. We had only 0.5 per cent of that. The little bit of work we have done in the past 24 months has given us a lot of hope because if you look at I-to-I traffic on our Air India network, it has moved from 0.5 per cent to 4 per cent,” he added.

The situation is even better at Delhi Airport. The share of international transit traffic in the international traffic of Air India at the airport is about 10 per cent, he said.

“On European flights, we are getting almost 20 per cent I-to-I traffic.”

Flight check transit air traffic 

The number of international passengers on Indian carriers passing through six major Indian airports — Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad — to reach their destinations increased 97.09 per cent year-on-year (YoY) to 68,305 in February, according to Cirium’s data, reviewed by Business Standard.

Dhaka, Kathmandu, Colombo, Bangkok, Singapore, and Dubai are the top six final destinations for these transit passengers.

Aggarwal said: “Air India is aiming to grow the share of transit traffic to about 10 per cent in India from the current 4 per cent in the next 5-10 years.”

He said if Air India was able to capture that extra 5-6 per cent share, it would have to deploy 30 widebody planes just to cater to it, which indicates a growth opportunity.

“With the two-way connectivity we would be creating for traffic flow from the east of India to the west, we feel we are in a good position to capitalise on that.”

He said major Indian airports such as Delhi and Mumbai did not have the funds needed to develop them as hubs because they were “burdened” with heavy revenue-sharing agreements with the government. 

Therefore, some “out of the box thinking” would be needed to arrange these funds and develop these airports as hubs.

Customer experience at these airports is not up to the level of major hubs in West Asia such as Doha and Dubai.

He said Air India was happy that IndiGo was now adding widebody planes to its fleet.

Demand for long-haul and ultra-long-haul traffic from India was so high that “we are barely scratching the surface”.