One-third of our traffic comes via A-I links: Air India Express MD

About one-third of Air India Express’s total passengers come through connections from Air India flights, which is a “very large” share for a low-cost carrier, the former’s managing director, Aloke Singh, said on Thursday.

 

Air India Express currently has a one-way codeshare partnership with its parent airline. This allows Air India to sell seats on Air India Express flights through its own booking channels, enabling passengers to book a single itinerary that includes flights from both airlines. However, the reverse — Air India Express selling seats on Air India flights — is not yet possible because, as Singh explained, the process is “more complicated” and system integration remains a “challenge”.

 

Asked about the proportion of traffic coming through Air India’s network, Singh said, “It is large and it is growing rapidly. So today, at the group level, almost one-third of our total traffic is connecting. This is a very large number for a low-cost airline.”

 

He mentioned Air India Express primarily focuses on routes connecting metro cities with tier-II and tier-III cities within India, with very little overlap with Air India’s route network. “The overlap would probably not be more than 5–7 per cent in terms of city pairs,” Singh said during a discussion at the Aviation India 2025 summit here.

 

Singh said Air India Express has grown roughly 25 per cent year-on-year (Y-o-Y) for the last three years in terms of capacity. The airline currently has about 110 planes in its fleet. “We aim to double the fleet in the next four to five years from what we are today,” he added.

 

At present, about 50 per cent of the airline’s planes are deployed on domestic routes, while the remaining are deployed on international routes. The airline is “densifying” its presence on domestic routes now and expects the domestic share to inch up to 60 per cent in the next couple of years, Singh noted.

 

“On the domestic city pairs we operate, we want to be at least one-third of the capacity share. That is the way we are growing our network because we need a certain scale and size to compete with a large competitor. Otherwise, you are insignificant. This business is about size and scale. This size and scale are better if they can be focused on certain routes. So, it’s depth first and breadth later,” he stated.

 

He said that currently, only about 4 per cent of the total capacity of Air India Express falls under the “large narrow-body (A321 planes)” category. “We will actually go up to almost 30 per cent in a four to five-year period. This will give us a huge unit cost advantage (as fuel consumption per passenger will decrease),” Singh noted.

 

In this winter season, Air India Express is scheduled to operate more than 2,700 weekly flights on 114 domestic routes and over 780 weekly flights on 70 international routes. Compared to the winter season last year, the number of routes has increased by 25 per cent.