Air Deccan To Launch New Routes

Vyas Sivanand - Bangalore

The hyper active and always in news low-cost carrier company, Air Deccan will be launching several new routes by mid-December. Few routes are such where nobody has ever ventured before. Speaking exclusively to Express Travel & Tourism, captain G R Gopinath, managing director, Air Deccan said, "We will be launching new routes in December, which will cover Chennai-Mumbai, Mumbai-Chennai, Mumbai-Coimbatore, Coimbatore-Mumbai, Chennai-Kolkata and Kolkata-Chennai. This would be the first phase for the month."

The company will launch other bigger routes many a first covering Delhi-Agra-Delhi, Agra-Jaipur-Delhi, Delhi-Dehradun, Chandigarh-Jammu, Delhi-Chandigarh, Delhi-Kanpur and Delhi-Jabalpur via Bhopal in the second phase of the month. Surprisingly, the only state where the company is finding difficulty in entering is Kerala. Points Gopinath, "We were aggressively planning to enter Kerala as it is a big market. But the ground handling at Kochi airport is done by Air-India, which charges almost five times of what we are incurring. If we go for a Bangalore-Kochi flight, the charge would be Rs 2000 while others charge about Rs 4000. But with the current ground handling charges, we will have to increase our fare to Rs 3000, which is against our model. Another aspect is that we are always keen to get out of the airport as soon as possible. But as Air-India does the ground handling, the process will be delayed."

According to Gopinath, the CM of Kerala, Oommen Chandy is keen but the hurdle is Air-India. "We are definitely enthusiastic about Kerala. It has the largest number of migrant population with over two million people in the middle-east and the largest expat population in Delhi. If tourism has to catch up, I think more people should be visiting the state and connectivity issues showed be made easy." Air Deccan currently has seven ATRs and is in the process of acquiring five more. The new ATRs will essentially ply the Delhi routes. "We currently have three Airbus and plan to add two in February, two in April and two more in September 2005," said Gopinath.

Air Deccan expects to touch $ 100 million by the end of the current fiscal year, which is their first full financial year of operation. "We will be in profit as we are opening new routes. With that, we can be sure of better results too." The company had earlier announced to touch $120 million by the end of the current fiscal but soon lowered it. According to Gopinath, the reason was not because of low demand but only because of delay in putting aircraft in operation. Air Deccan was recently in talks with Richard Branson's Virgin Blue for raising funds. But the talks were called off because of the restrictive norms. "Branson wanted to invest but it was later shelved as our law does not agree. There can be lot of controversies but if the government allows then we will definitely go ahead," said Gopinath.