Air Asia plans to make city its next hub

Air Asia is contemplating parking its planes in the city from next year to add to its existing bases in New Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata. The low-cost airline, being operated in India in association with Tata Sons, is likely to run international flights from next year to Malaysia and Thailand. It has been apprehensive about the airport connectivity in Hyderabad, but the proposed metro rail link could activate its plans.

“Hyderabad is an important market. The challenge has been airport connectivity as the city is far and we have a situation where you pay ₹800-₹900 for a cab when the air fare is about ₹1500! This needed to be sorted out and metro link is good,” observed Air Asia managing director & chief executive officer Amar Abrol.

Pretty bullish on the airline market growth in the country (21% to 22% annually), Air Asia will increase the domestic footprint to another city taking it to 20 destinations overall and the newest one could be in western India.

“We will be dispassionate and run any service only if we find the route to be profitable. We have opened several virgin routes in that fashion,” he said.

“We had 14 planes as on December 2017 from initial seven and by the end of the year we will have 21 A320s flying - fitted with GE engines. From there on we plan to induct 10 planes every year so that we can have about 60 in the next four to five years. We are aiming at double digit growth in two years,” he explained, during his recent visit here.

Mr. Abrol pointed out that Air Asia was the only airline connecting Tier-II/Tier-III cities like Ranchi, Imphal, Bhubaneshwar, Raipur, Visakhapatnam and the likes to the metros rather than just metro to metro like Delhi-Mumbai without taking advantage of ‘Udaan’ scheme.

“We are growing aggressively, are on the right trajectory and posted profit in last quarter. We will continue to remain in the low-cost, low-fare market and there is room for everyone as the estimated air travellers’ potential is 330 million from the current 75 million. But, we avoid greenfield airports as it requires smaller aircraft and we are on A320s,” he asserted.

Interestingly, Air Asia plan to have midnight services connecting Bangalore, Pune, Delhi and others saw fully booked. “People are more open to fly at night as they are able to beat the peak-hour traffic rather than travel two to three hours to and fro the airports!,” adds the CEO.