115/2/2018
PUNE: Over the
last decade, even as India’s air passenger traffic more than doubled, the
pecking order of the top air routes on which people travel has largely stayed
the same, with sectors such as Delhi-Mumbai-Delhi, Delhi-Bengaluru-Delhi and
Mumbai-Bengaluru-Mumbai continuing to top the routes ranked in terms of number
of seats deployed.
Routes such as Delhi-Pune-Delhi have, however, climbed from
the fifteenth place in 2007 to the sixth place in 2017 while the
Delhi-Kolkata-Delhi route scaled up to the fourth spot in 2017 from seventh in
2007, according to data sourced from civil aviation research firm OAG. The
Delhi-Lucknow-Delhi route climbed four places from the seventeenth rank in 2007
to twelfth in 2017.
Incidentally, while many of the sectors did not see
significant changes in their standings, the absolute number of seats deployed
on each of the sectors has grown over the past ten years. However, certain
routes such as Delhi-Kolkata-Delhi, Delhi-Pune-Delhi, Delhi-Ahmedabad-Delhi,
Delhi-Lucknow-Delhi and Delhi-Hyderabad-Delhi, which witnessed a sluggish
growth till 2014, witnessed a spike in the number of seats allocated in the
following three years.
The routes that moved down the pecking order include the
Mumbai-Chennai-Mumbai route, down from the third the highest number of seats in
2007 to the tenth place in 2017, the Mumbai-Ahmedabad-Mumbai sector (down from
eighth in 2007 to the fifteenth place in 2017) and the Mumbai-Kolkata-Mumbai
sector (from twelfth place to the seventeenth).
OAG provided with a list of top 17 routes operated by Indian
airlines, domestic and international, in terms of seats deployed which, while
not being the same as the actual passengers flown, is a factor of growth in
passenger traffic. The only international destination in the top 17 was the
Dubai route. Not only did the top order remain largely the same but trunk
routes also continued to contribute a substantial share to the total number of
seats deployed.
According to the data for 17 sectors, airlines allocated
nearly 47 per cent of the seats to the top five sectors in 2017, slightly
higher than 43 per cent in 2007. Official government data has showed that
India’s annual air passenger traffic more than doubled to over 11 crores in
2017 from around four crore in 2007.
Notwithstanding the fact that top order remained the same and
certain sectors saw a sharp ascension in ranking, there were some routes where
ramping up of capacity did not happen as rapidly as other sectors resulting in
them plummeting in the rankings. Notably, these primarily include sectors
involving the congested Mumbai airport.
Apart from the Mumbai-Dubai-Mumbai route, none of the other
routes involving the financial capital of India has seen an increase in
ranking. The Mumbai-Chennai-Mumbai route, the Mumbai-Ahmedabad-Mumbai route and
the Mumbai-Kolkata-Mumbai route fell down the order.
The total number of seats on the Delhi-Ahmedabad-Delhi route
increased from around 12.62 lakh in 2007 to 13.71 lakh in 2014. After that, the
number of seats rose sharply to 16.72 lakh in 2015, 21.36 lakh in 2016 and
25.18 lakh in 2017 — nearly double of what it was three years ago. While the number of seats on the Delhi-Pune-Delhi sector
nearly doubled in the seven years between 2007 (9.74 lakh) and 2014 (17.26
lakh), it then surged sharply to 30.31 lakh over a span of three years in 2017.
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