CEO of low-cost airline IndiGo Ronojoy Dutta, who spoke to Pranav Mukul, expects this trend to stay, and said the carrier is looking to capitalise on this by expanding into new international markets as the sole non-stop service.
Our system capacity on one day — November 8 — was highest ever, even pre-Covid.
We want to grow both domestic and international, but I would guess that in about 5-6 years from now, international will be about 30-40 per cent of our capacity.
So, whether it is Nairobi or Dusseldorf, they all stop at Doha, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, etc and similarly from Bali and Manila, they stop at Singapore or Bangkok.
The problem is that these non-stop flights face a lot of one-stop problems. Between Delhi and London, we counted there are 22 ways of getting there — through Oman, Dubai, Amsterdam and people never paid premium for the non-stop.
That was also our thinking in CFM vs Pratt because our fleet is so big now that even if we have two engine types, they are large enough in numbers where the complexity is not there.
Having a competitor, who was not driven by basic economics but by politics and having a taxpayer as a cushion was not healthy for us.
Let me give you some examples — we did charters for religious groups to Nairobi, we did three charters for student groups to Tashkent, we have done charters for shipping companies all over the world, we have done charters to Male, and now Phuket.