Newstrack

Turkish Airlines targets 30% growth in 2007

Jyoti Koul - New Delhi

With a fleet of 102 aircraft, Turkish Airlines is expecting its traffic from India to grow by 30 per cent in the current year. According to the airline, it receives a large number of queries from India for incentives and leisure travel.

Pramod Sahni, its manager (Sales & Marketing), India, claimed that it received close to 18,000 travellers who visited Turkey last year. "In the process of becoming a member of Star Alliance, Turkish Airlines is keen on expanding its presence in India. With a limit of 1,500 seats between Mumbai and Delhi, the airline has already requested the government to increase the number of flights to India.

"We want to increase the frequencies and talks are on between the civil aviation ministries of the two countries. Currently, we are doing over 80 per cent load factor. We have seven flights (four to Delhi and three to Mumbai). If we want to operate a bigger aircraft, we need a bilateral approval which is likely to come through in about a month's time," he said. The focus of the airline is to generate traffic to Turkey and is currently enjoying 87 per cent market share to Turkey. Besides this, Turkish is already talking about putting an Indian crew on its flights.

Right now it is promoting the destination in the absence of a tourism board. "We are going to business houses, doing campaigns in media, tapping Bollywood, etc. Balaji Telefilms and Popcorn Entertainment have already got an MoU to shoot some feature films and serials in Turkey. The GIFA awards are also being hosted in Istanbul in December this year," Sahni added.

He informed that the airline recently did an Incredible India campaign in Istanbul with four Indian tour operators. "We also invited Turkish inbound tour operators to interact with the agents here in India and now we are taking Indian agents to Turkey to promote India with the help of the Indian embassy and the ministry of tourism," he added.