Jet Airways: Selling beyond India
Jet Airways is acting as a serious player in the Indian aviation market. It is in the process of becoming a strong network player, a true global carrier and will soon be among the top five global airlines, says Sonu Kripalani, Vice President, Passenger Sa
ANITA JAIN of passengers and become a profitable airline or have full seats and be a losing airline. This is one of the toughest period in Indian aviation and each airline is losing out on passengers, revenues and profits. There is a need to be more disciplined in terms of pricing, bring in route rationalisation, cut on routes with no profits and manage the cost in a better way.
Talking about route rationalisation, the metro routes in India are saturated as the industry seat factor is about 68- 70 per cent on metro routes. Thus, we are flying 30 per cent empty aircrafts so where is the need to add more capacity. Instead, we should look at secondary markets which are growing and makes economic sense for our business. As Jet Airways, we have curtailed our domestic expansion and are focussing more on international operations, especially on Gulf routes. Thus, airlines should fly on routes which are profitable and makes economic sense to their operating model, revenues and profits. Our focus is on becoming a network carrier especially in the ASEAN region. We always worked with our interline partners and offered destinations beyond our direct points. However, with more Indians exploring the unusual destinations in the regional market, there is a need to market our interline partners connecting destinations. For example, there is a tremendous increase from India to destinations like Koh Samui, Phuket, Krabi, Chiang Mai, etc. Though we fly to only Bangkok, we have put in some competitive fares directly to these destinations in association with our interline and network partners. We want to promote Jet Airways which goes beyond the usual destinations and with increasing competition from Indian LCCs on international front, it’s time for us to find out new markets like Thailand, Singapore, China, Japan, Australia, Korea, Vietnam, etc.
In India, LCCs mainly fillin by offering low fares till 1015 days prior to departure and shoots up the fares after that till departure date. This way, there is no consistency in pricing and no assurance about earning profits on bottom-line. On the other land, for JetKonnect, we have 10-12 classes and we gradually fill in those seats with calculative pricing structure. We look at earning revenue per flight instead of just looking at seat loads. Also, we have added minimum eight premium seats on all JetKonnect flights which add up to our bottom-line.
There is also a market and gap for growth for Jet Airways’ full service carrier model as not all travellers book in advance, especially from the corporate segment. Also, the service standards matter for a legacy carrier to maintain its brand loyalty among domestic and international passengers.
We are a carrier that is going to be a long- term serious player of the country, who wants to be a network player, who wants to further expand its global network on profitable routes and become one of the top five carriers in the world and is working towards that goal.