Budget airline SpiceJet, which has offered two lakh tickets at a special price of 99 paise for two or more passengers travelling together, will be the first domestic airline to introduce domestic travel insurance at a nominal cost of Rs 129 per traveller.
Making these announcements on the occasion of the carrier’s second anniversary, SpiceJet CEO Siddhanta Sharma and Director Ajay Singh disclosed that 99 paise tickets would be on sale for two weeks from May 22 on all its non-stop flights, covering 14 destinations. The carrier, which was hitherto a no-frills airline, will henceforth start selling snacks on board.
On the insurance offer, Sharma said the scheme, introduced in association with Tata-AIG, has a plethora of features. A passenger opting for the scheme will get Rs 1, 500 if the flight was delayed for more than six hours. He would get the money back if the flight was cancelled and he would also get Rs 7,500 for lost baggage in addition to what the airline pays in such eventuality. Besides, if a passenger is travelling by train after a SpiceJet journey or flies in another airline, he would be covered for these modes of transport also.
Sharma, who claimed that his airline would achieve a net breakeven in this quarter and may even come out with a small profit for this fiscal, said it would be adding eight brand new Boeing aircraft including five B737-99 ER to its fleet. With this, the airline fleet strength would go up from the present nine aircraft to 19 by March 2008 to 26 by March 2009. While rival Air Deccan has suffered a loss of Rs 213 crore in the last quarter and most others performed badly, SpiceJet was the only airline which may achieve breakeven, Sharma said.
Responding to funding, he said SpiceJet was facing no problem in this regard and added that there would be no dilution of equity as the company was comfortably placed in terms of resources. “Every single airline is looking at diluting stakes and raising money, we are not,” he added.
On oil hedging, he said the airline was talking to hedging consultants and would like to do it when the prices were low. Asked whether SpiceJet would like to have alliances with other airlines, Singh noted that there were several areas such as route rationalisation, sharing of infrastructure, airport staff, spare parts, carrying passengers of other airlines where carriers can reach an understanding.
