Mumbai: The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) reported that India’s domestic air passenger traffic grew by 15 per cent year-on-year to 132.67 lakh passengers in May 2023. The country’s domestic air passenger traffic stood at 114.67 lakh passengers in the year-ago period. The number of passengers carried by domestic airlines during January-May 2023 was 636.07 lakh as against 467.37 lakh during the same period last year, registering an annual growth of 36.10 per cent and a monthly growth of 15.24 per cent.
Indian Airlines Market Share
According to the DGCA report, low-cost carrier IndiGo increased its market share from 57.5 per cent to 61.4 per cent during the last month while carrying a total of 81.10 lakh passengers. Last month also saw the grounding of city-based carrier GoFirst. GoFirst, which is currently undergoing insolvency proceedings at the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT), has not taken flight since May 3.
All three Tata group airlines – Air India, AirAsia India and Vistara (which is 49 per cent owned by Singapore Airlines) also saw their market share increase sequentially in May 2023 to 9.4 per cent, 7.9 per cent and 9 per cent. of the total traffic pie respectively.
The total number of passengers flown by Air India and Vistara during the month under review were 12.44 lakh and 11.95 lakh respectively. Data shows that AirAsia India carried 10.41 lakh passengers in May 2023. The combined total number of these three airlines was 34.8 lakh passengers, which was 26.3 percent of the total domestic air passenger traffic in May 2023. As compared to 4 per cent in April 2023 last month.
As per the data, on punctuality parameters, Akasaka Air recorded the highest on-time performance of 92.6 per cent among all domestic carriers from four major metro airports in May.
The overall cancellation rate for scheduled domestic airlines for the month of May 2023 stood at 0.44 per cent.
Passenger complaints during the month
During May 2023, a total of 556 passenger related complaints were received by scheduled domestic airlines. The number of complaints per 10,000 passengers in the month of May 2023 has been around 0.42.