‘We believe in the Indian market’
NEW DELHI: Lufthansa’s senior vice-president of sales and the chief commercial officer of the Frankfurt hub, Heike Birlenbach, spoke to Anisha Dutta about the airline’s expansion plans in India, the Indian aviation sector, among other issues. Here are the edited excerpts:
What are your expansion plans in India? Will you add new routes connecting more Indian cities?
Yes, we have an expansion coming up, but first I would like to talk about how long our history is that connects Lufthansa to the Indian market here. We will be able to celebrate our 60th year of activities in India this year. Our first flight flew 60 years ago to Kolkata and now we have about 58 flights per week between Europe and India, and we will expand it by another five by next spring. We will add another service from Bengaluru to Munich also, and connect it to other hubs. So throughout our European hubs—Frankfurt, Munich and Zurich with Lufthansa and Swiss— we are able to bring people from India to the world and bring them to India. We believe in the Indian market; it is a growing market. We know that by next year there will be about 50 million international travellers here from India. There is a lot happening and we would like to be part of that story.
Has there been any impact on outbound travel market from India due to the economic slowdown?
Despite the fact that there is an economic slowdown in India overall, the travel sector has grown over the last year, and we were able to really profit from it so we have a growing amount of passengers coming to India or going from India to the world specifically in the leisure segment, where people travel for pleasure either visiting friends or relatives or going to explore the world. This is a growing sector which we also see outside India. But even the business market is growing though not at the same pace.
Especially in the last year we have grown quite tremendously. It is also linked to some external factors that diverted a lot of traffic via Lufthansa—that was the closure of the Pakistani airspace for some carriers and the reduction of services. Therefore, a lot of that demand was then driven via Lufthansa. Hence we have quite a high growth rate in 2019 so far compared to last year.
What is your take on the India’s aviation sector crisis with airlines like the Jet Airways and Air India struggling?
In India, what I believe is, the market demand is very big. It’s a huge country and the demand of customers travelling domestically and internationally is growing. I believe, the way to cope with it is that companies, airlines are able to cater to the need of the customers but also have an efficient set up and have their operation and cost under control. It is really important to look after both in order to have a solid growth.
The aviation industry as such is not an easy industry to be in, you really need to make sure that you have your customers under control and you build your operation in the most efficient way but also at the same time invest in the customer’s needs. This is what we are doing at Lufthansa.