Satyaki Raghunath, Chief Operating Officer, Bengaluru Airport
| Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement
The nation’s third-largest airport by way of passenger visitors, the Bengaluru International Airport, has seen a fast proliferation of travel to home locations since COVID-19, spurred by a requirement for travel to smaller cities.
Before COVID-19, the share of passengers touring to metropolitan cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Chennai accounted for 75% of whole passengers, which has now shrunk to 42% because the share of non-metro travellers grew from 25% to 58%, explains the airport’s Chief Operating Officer, Satyaki Raghunath in an interview to The Hindu. The airport recorded 28.12 million home passengers out of a complete 31.91 passengers within the monetary 12 months 2022-2023.
The demand from these travellers throughout COVID-19, when prepare travel was now not a most well-liked alternative for many due to well being security protocols, additionally usually led to airways opening new routes and later offering extra frequencies on them.
“So, we have gone from 54 domestic destinations to 74. We are now connected to Jamnagar(Gujarat), Jaisalmer (Rajasthan), Bareilly (Uttar Pradesh), Agartala (Tripura), Jharsuguda (Odisha). Five years back you couldn’t have imagined that there would be a direct flight to these cities from Bengaluru,” says Mr. Raghunath.
These far-flung cities account for 45% of the entire non-metro visitors from Bengaluru, whereas Jaipur, Lucknow, Pune and Goa represent 30% of the entire non-metro visitors. The remaining 25% of the visitors is to cities similar to Trichy, Salem and Vizag that are throughout the 75-minute flying distance.
The variety of home passengers at the airport is now at 105% of the pre-COVID degree. The variety of worldwide passengers final fiscal (3.78 million) although lagged behind the pre-COVID degree by round 10% as international carriers are but to restore capability to the degrees seen in 2019-2020 due to supply-chain constraints in addition to due to the Russia-Ukraine battle which has closed part of the European sky. However, by the tip of this fiscal the airport is predicted to exceed the pre-Covid passenger variety of 33 million and file between 36 million to 37 million whole passengers, the highest govt says.
The rising passenger numbers at the airport, together with a lot of company travellers, additionally make the airport enticing to long-haul worldwide carriers similar to German service Lufthansa which launched a brand new flight to Munich earlier this month with its Airbus A350-900 plane, which additionally has a first-class cabin.
“Bengaluru has an advantage in service, technology and biotech sectors driving air traffic from here, which means these travellers have the propensity to spend more money. This gives airlines premium passengers allowing them to put more business and first-class capacity and enjoy better yields [average airfare per passenger per mile]. Among Indian airports, Bengaluru has among the highest yields for routes to Europe, and the U.S.,” says Mr. Raghunath.
Over the previous three-and-half years, the airport has added a lot of long-haul routes similar to Air India flights to San Francisco, Japan Airlines flights to Narita, Qantas connecting Sydney, Lufthansa connecting Munich, and Virgin Atlantic anticipated to launch flights to London Heathrow in March 2024.
