The Hindu Business Line : IndiGo cuts daily flights by 20%

New Delhi, July 19 The low-cost airline, IndiGo, has announced an interim summer schedule that is to reduce the number of daily flights operated by more than 20 per cent although it is not suspending operations to any of the 17 cities to which it flies.

The schedule, which comes into effect from Sunday, will remain in force till the end of September.

From Sunday, the airline will operate 95 daily flights instead of the 120 daily flights being operated currently, and will suspend non-stop round trip flights between five cities including Bangalore-Kochi, Hyderabad-Chennai, Nagpur-Kolkata and Ahmedabad-Pune.

“The spiralling cost of aviation turbine fuel has affected the non-stop connections that the airline offers to some cities,” the airline President and Chief Executive Officer, Mr Bruce Ashby, said in a statement.

New routes

The changes in schedule announced mean that a passenger from Mumbai wanting go to Bhubaneswar will now have to first come to Delhi and then travel onwards to their final destination.

The airline earlier offered daily, non-stop connections between Bhubaneswar and Mumbai and flights in the return direction as well.

The airline joins a growing list of domestic carriers including Jet Airways, JetLite and SpiceJet that have announced reduction in daily flight operations to contain growing losses, mainly on account of rising fuel prices.

Temporary reduction

While Jet Airways has announced a temporary reduction in schedules, which will see a 10 per cent reduction of flight frequencies of the combined fleet of Jet and JetLite, SpiceJet now operates 100 daily flights as against 117 earlier.