Demands for India Flights From GCC to remain High : Visa Global Survey

Demands for India bound flights from the Gulf Cooperation Council and Middle East region remains very high and as per the new Visa Global Travel Intentions Survey, 2011, released  by Arabian Business weekly magazine, India was voted one of the top global destinations for travelers from the UAE  in 2011.India is home to a large population of expatriate Indians  in the Gulf region who travel on yearly basis to their origin country. The trends is seen in the operation of Indian's national carrier Air India,  which operates around 53 weekly flights to Dubai and its low-fare unit, Air India Express, operates 54 weekly flights to the city but still fly with overbooked capacity. Other airlines in the region have already expanded into flight offering to many Indian cities and have huge expansion plans for the next year to tap the under supplied market.

For example, Qatar Airways has said that India remains its key growth market in 2012,  and it operates 95 flights a week to 12 other Indian cities such as Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Goa besides Kolkata, the services for which were launched only recently. Indigo airlines, India’s largest airlines group and a low-cost carrier has also announced Dubai to New Delhi and Dubai to Mumbai flights service recently. Other airlines such as Jet Airways, Air Arabia, Emirates, Fly Dubai and Jazeera Airways are also envisage to launch more Indian services. The Gulf region have always be a high demanding sector for India flights and due to gross undersupply of airlines seats, the air fares decrease is unlikely in near future with the airlines focusing to launch services on newer routes. The demand from the Indian market is proving to be a silver lining for many International airlines as worldwide trends indicates a decrease in flights demands as well as slashing of airlines prices.

Air India Toppled by Indigo As the third biggest Domestic carrier

India's largest Low cost airline carrier Indigo Airways has overtaken state-owned Air India from the Number 3 spot in terms of market share in the domestic market in November going by the air traffic data released by the Directorate General of Civil aviation (DGCA).

As against 17.1 % Domestic traffic share in aviation market Indigo  Airlines now have a  17.3 per cent share in the domestic market. Yhe data is compiled on a monthly basis and this ranking owes to the November data wherein,the budget carrier flew 8.43 lakh passengers as against 8.36 lakh air travelers flown by the full-service Air India. Presently the airline operates 207 daily flights to 22 destinations with its fleet of 31 Airbus A320 aircraft. These include, apart from all the metros, cities and smaller towns such as Agartala, Panaji, Guwahati, Dibrugarh, Patna, Pune, Srinagar and Vadodara and other Indian cities.

Not only this, the domestic air traffic of scheduled domestic carriers also rose 25.1 per cent to 48.75 lakh during November 2010 as against 38.98 lakh in the corresponding month last year. The domestic air traffic was up 19 per cent at 468.09 lakh during January-November of 2010 as against 393.53 lakh during the same period in the previous year.

The recent trends have shown that, the air traffic market has shifted towards low-cost carriers and airlines such as Jet Airways and Kingfisher Airlines have also been quick to adopt themselves towards this trend and hence move their capacity to no-frill arms Jet Konnect and Kingfisher Red.
The Indigo Airlines has also asked for permission from the Indian Government to start International Flights mainly Flights from UAE and also International Flights to India.