Vistara seeks to improve aircraft loads as network expands

New Delhi: Vistara doubled the number of passengers carried and managed to fill more seats on its aircraft in February than in January. But it still flew with almost four in 10 empty seats last month. Compare this with the incumbents. IndiGo, Jet Airways and Jetlite, SpiceJet, GoAir and even Air India managed to fill at least eight in 10 seats on their aircraft in February, a month when passenger traffic growth was over 21% percent. Even smaller airlines, Air Costa and AirAsia, India managed better aircraft occupancy in February, at almost 80 percent each.

But Vistara had the least amount of passengers complaining - it faced only one complaint related to catering last month. SpiceJet faced the maximum number of complaints at 248, followed by Jet and Jetlite together at 221 and IndiGo at 213.

So should Vistara worry over empty aircraft seats? A spokesperson said the improved passenger load factor (compared to January) signifies “increasing levels of customer confidence in Vistara’s product and service offerings. We attribute this to a significant pick up of the market sentiment and enhanced awareness among our customers about Vistara’s differentiators. Having expanded our network to new destinations, increased flight frequencies on existing sectors and ongoing product enhancement will further result in growth of our load factor.” Vistara’s load factor (number of occupied seats) was 58.6 percent in February against 45.4 percent in January.

In all, India’s domestic airlines flew 60.16 lakh passengers against 49.46 lakh passengers flown in February of the previous year. The latest domestic passenger traffic data released by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation shows that IndiGo continued to lead the market with a wide margin, accounting for over 37 percent share of passengers. This means every third Indian air passenger traveled on an IndiGo flight in February. Jet Airways together with Jetlite accounted for 24.2 percent of the market which means roughly every fourth passenger traveled on Jet’s domestic network during the month. Air India stood at 18.2 percent or a little less than a fifth of the market whereas SpiceJet - which had cornered a fifth of the market last year - carried only 9.3 of total passengers since it had reduced capacity earlier.