The Hindu Business Line : High incidence of cancellations plagues frequent fliers

The coming days could bring more bad news for frequent travellers as all airlines have to submit their monthly schedules to the Director General of Civil Aviation by the middle of next week.

Ashwini Phadnis

New Delhi, July 4

Regular fliers have a new complaint – of cancelled, rescheduled and clubbed domestic flights disturbing their business schedules.

The general manager of a major European airline in Delhi laments that till recently he had the option of taking an early morning flight operated by a private airline to Chennai and pack in a full days work.

But in the last few days things have changed, and while the carrier still offers a morning connection from the Capital to Chennai, the few hours by which the departure has been pushed back cuts into time earlier spent in doing business in South India.

With the domestic air travel market expecting to report a flat or negative growth during June, airlines are taking all possible steps, including cancelling, rescheduling and clubbing flights to minimise the impact of rising fuel prices on airlines’ bottomlines.

Official sources told Business Line that till date the airlines had cancelled 120 daily flights. “There has been a decline of about 19 daily flights into Delhi and about 16 daily flights into Mumbai alone. Air Deccan has cancelled or suspended 35 daily flights, JetLite 26 and SpiceJet 21,” they added.

While Jet Airways 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, analysts feel industry will prune capacity by up to 18-20 per cent of the almost 1,600 flights they operate daily. In other words, there could be a reduction of anything between 300 and 320 daily flights that are currently being operated.

Jet Airways plans to temporarily reduce frequency on the Delhi-Kolkata, Chennai-Mumbai, Bangalore-Mumbai, Delhi-Chennai, Mumbai-Nagpur, Mumbai-Hyderabad, Mumbai-Delhi, Mumbai-Ahmedabad, Chennai-Bangalore and Bangalore-Hyderabad sectors.

Similarly, JetLite will temporarily reduce frequencies on the Delhi-Chandigarh, Lucknow, Hyderabad, Bhopal, Ahmedabad, Goa, Jaipur and Mumbai-Bhuj-Indore sectors. Besides till July 7, JetLite will also temporarily reduce frequency on the Mumbai-Delhi sector. The reductions announced by the airline will remain in force till September 15.

Travel agents add that Air India has announced that till the end of October it will not operate a Chennai-Mumbai-Chennai flight (AI 969-970), Bangalore-Pune-Goa-Bangalore, Mumbai-Ahmedabad and Ahmedabad-Mumbai, among others.

A spokesman of Kingfisher Airlines said that since the buy out of Air Deccan, the new entity was operating 450 daily flight in place of 600 earlier.

The coming days could bring more bad news for frequent travellers as all airlines have to submit their monthly schedules to the Director General of Civil Aviation by the middle of next week and the expectations are of even more cut backs, officials said.

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