Comments
Airline operator Emirates plans to add new destinations in the US and Russia from Hyderabad via Dubai in the next few months, anticipating a pick up in demand growth after a brief period of sluggish market in the last few weeks. Immediately on its radar are daily services from Hyderabad to Dallas and Seattle via Dubai.
“We have finalised plans to launch the Dallas service on February 2, 2012 and the Seattle service on March 1,” Mr K.P. Venugopal, Emirates Sales Manager, Andhra Pradesh, told Business Line .
For both the services, the airline will deploy different versions of Boeing 777 aircraft, including the model that has a seating capacity of 428.
“Our market estimates are that there are about 1,500 passengers flying to Dubai and Seattle each every month from Hyderabad. The passengers mostly include corporate travellers and visiting friends and family members,” he said.
The inaugural offer in the economy class has been fixed at Rs 52,900 (return fare) to Dallas, and Rs 56,550 to Seattle. Also included in its plans are to connect Hyderabad to St Petersburg and Baghdad in November this year and Buenos Aires and Rio in January next year.
Currently, the airline has a capacity of about 5,500 from Hyderabad every week. “We will be expanding the capacity as demand picks up. We saw a sluggish phase this month, mostly due to shortening of the holiday period as a result of the political situation in the State. We expect the demand to peak in the December-January period,” Mr Venugopal said.
Emirates operates 185 flights a week from 10 airports in India, including Mumbai (five), Delhi (four) and Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad (three each).
The airline, which has 16 A 380s and another 75 on order for its global operations, has no plans to deploy this aircraft in India.
The airline is betting big on traffic from Hyderabad picking up, despite the international airport operator charging taxes worth Rs 4,265 a ticket, as against Rs 2,398 in Chennai airport and Rs 3,460 in Bangalore airport.
“The high tax structure here (Hyderabad international airport) has seen some diversion of traffic to neighbouring Chennai and Bangalore airports from some cities in the State,” he said.
Comments
COMMENT NOW
Comments
Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.
We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of TheHindu Businessline and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.