Indigo second in the world's top 20 airlines in growth of passenger seats

In what has been a good year for Indian aviation, Indigo was the  second best performing airline in terms of growth in passenger seats out of 20 top global airlines, based on their market size, in December 2023 compared to pre-Covid December 2019. 

According to OAG, an aviation analytics company, IndiGo’s seats per day rose by 29.7 per cent from 47,738 seats in December 2019 to 61,913 last month.

It was behind only Spirit Airlines which grew by 34.8 per cent in the same period while Air China was third in the pecking order, growing at 20.4 per cent. At least nine of the top 20 airlines in the world are operating at higher seat capacity than in pre-pandemic 2019.

The growth of seats and market share have helped IndiGo become the eighth largest airline in the world, the only Indian carrier on the list.

In terms of global airports, only Delhi’s GMR group featured in the  top 20 global list, measured by the number of seats they have handled. GMR, which operates all the terminals in New Delhi and is also in Hyderabad and Goa, came in at number eleven and has still not recovered to the passenger traffic levels of December 2019. 

Delhi airport handled 3.70 million seats in December 2023 compared to 3.76 million in the same month of 2019 – a drop of a marginal 1.6 per cent. However, the airport has exhibited a smart recovery in handling seats. This grew by 6.5 per cent in December 2023 over the previous month and is expected to cross the pre-pandemic levels pretty soon.

At the top of the global airport pecking order, Atlanta airport handled 5.1 million seats last month.

India is now also the third largest domestic market globally in terms of seats, after the US and China. India had a total of 15.9 million seats in December and has crossed the December 2019 peak when it had 15.5 million.

Number one is the US which handled 84 million seats, followed by China with 67 million.   

What is interesting is that the Mumbai-Delhi route remains among the top 10 busiest domestic routes in the world. It was ranked number eight last December with as many as 654,581 seats.

At the top of the charts, it’s a draw between Jeju International and Seoul in South Korea where as many as 1.2 million seats were deployed in December.