Civil aviation minister Ajit Singh has directed Air India to submit to him in a week’s time a plan to enhance its share in the domestic passenger market. The detailed plan has to include month-wise targets of market share along with corresponding strategy to achieve these targets for the next one year.
Low cost airlines IndiGo and SpiceJet have overtaken Air India carrying more passengers. IndiGo leads the market with 27.6% share followed by Jet Airways (25.2%) and SpiceJet (18.5%).
Singh has emphasised that Air India needs to put in more efforts and asked the airline management to come out with innovative and customer focused strategies to achieve optimum utilisation of all planes and also maximum utilisation of each plane. Air India's market share of 18.2% remains unchanged from July.
"Our market share has gone up from 16.5% to over 18% in last three months. We have introduced dynamic pricing and have reached out to corporates. Our business class revenue in domestic sector is up 30% and our on time performance too has improved to 86% from 69%," a senior airline executive said.
Meanwhile passenger traffic in India continues to fall on a month-on-month basis on the back of seasonality and 30% increase in fares. The total domestic passengers carried by domestic airlines in August were 43.69 lakh lower than 45.37 lakh flown in July.
