The latest figures from Domestic air travel indicate that not only has it recovered to pre-Covid levels but is also thriving as it has already crossed last year’s mark.
Highest Domestic Flyers Then Pre-Covid 2019 Levels
On Monday, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation(DGCA) released the data which shows that January-December 2023 saw 15.2 crore domestic air travelers.
The numbers appear to be the highest ever annual figure recorded in India interestingly.
Earlier, this number was 14.4 crore during pre-Covid calendar year 2019.
Later on it crashed to 6.3 crore in 2020, after a two-month suspension of regular flights during the national lockdown.
But, domestic air travel seems to have shown a smart recovery to 8.4 crore in 2021 and again improved and reached to 12.3 crore in 2022.
Foggy December Affecting The Performance
This simply indicates that last year saw more people flying within the country than ever before.
During CY 2023, IndiGo’s market share was 60.5%.
The remaining combined domestic share of the three Tata group airlines , Air India (9.7%), Vistara (9.1%) and AIX Connect (7.2%) comes to 26%.
Similarly, SpiceJet and Akasa’s market share reached 5.5% and 4.1%, respectively.
Besides these, other airlines accounted for the remaining 3.9% of the market share.
But with the arrival of foggy December, the on time performance of airlines fell sharply.
It has greatly affected the performance to the extent ranging from upcoming Akasa’s 72.7% for its domestic flights to Vistara’s 70.8%, IndiGo’s 68%, AIX Connect 65.7% and AI 52.4%.
When it comes to big airlines, SpiceJet’s OTP came to the lowest last month at just 29.9%.
According to the DGCA data, over 3.6 lakh domestic passengers faced flight delays last month and airlines had to spend over Rs 5.4 crore on their “facilitation.”
While all this was happening, December 2023 had seen 1.4 crore domestic flyers, still the highest ever monthly figure.
