The number of domestic air travelers dipped 5.3% in January to 49.4 lakhs, primarily due to the absence of festival and holiday travel witnessed in December 2010.
However, Vijay Mallya’s Kingfisher Airlines was the only domestic airline that did not see a decline in its occupancy level in January. It increased seat occupancy level from 85.9% during December to 86.5% in January, overtaking Spice Jet and Go Air to become the number two airline in terms of occupancy.
Its industry-beating performance also ensured that it was the market leader in the domestic segment, accounting for 19.5% of all passengers. Jet group, however, had a combined marketshare of 24.8%.
Indigo, however, continued to be the most ‘occupied’ airlines in India, with 88.6% of its seats paid for during January. Like the others, it also saw a decline, as it had 93.3% occupancy in December.
Indigo also had the distinction of seeing the lowest number of flight cancellations in the industry. Against 0.5% of cancellations, Jet Lite — the leader in this trend — had a whopping 3.5% cancellation.
Jet Lite and Jet Airways continued to have the lowest levels of occupancy of around 74%, down from around 82.5% in December. Jet Airways, however, had the highest level of on-time performance at 88.8%, followed closely by Kingfisher with 87.9%. SpiceJet and Air India were the poorest in terms of on-time performance with 67.9% and 75.1% respectively.
Go Air led in the number of passenger complaints, at 0.051% of passengers leaving the plain unhappy. It was followed by Jet Airways with 0.04% and SpiceJet with 0.031%.