Low-cost airline IndiGo widened its lead over Jet Airways and JetLite for carrying the maximum number of Indian passengers as it expanded its market share to 27.6% in August compared with 27% last month. Meanwhile, Jet Airways and JetLite together carried fewer passengers in August at only 25.2%, compared with 26.6% of the total domestic travelers in July.
It was for the first time in July that the Rahul Bhatia-owned budget airline had taken over the Jet Group carriers, which had been the biggest airline in India by market share for years. The prophecy made by industry experts then about the gap between IndiGo and Jet widening seems to have come true.
This month, IndiGo has flown 1.04 lakh more passengers than Jet Airways and Jet-Lite put together, as opposed to a lead of merely 19,000 passengers last month. However, fewer people flew in August compared with July. Scheduled domestic airlines carried 43.7 lakh passengers this month, much lesser than 45.4 lakh in July. This was still smaller than that in June when over half a million passengers at 51.1 lakh had undertaken air travel.
Meanwhile, SpiceJet also increased its market share in August to 18.5%. Wadia-owned GoAir at 7.4%.
National carrier Air India’s market share remained static at 18.2% in August too while Vijay Mallya’s financially-struggling carrier Kingfisher Airlines saw a smaller market share at 3.2% compared with 3.4% last month. As per data submitted by various domestic airlines, the number of passengers carried was 398.21 lakh between January and August 2012 against 396.31 lakh during the corresponding period in the previous year, showing a modest growth of 0.5%.
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