Airlines carried over 78 L people in March

 More and more people are flying inside India with fresh government data showing a 24.03% growth in number of passengers in the first three months of this year.

During January-March this year, domestic airlines carried 230.03 lakh people as against 185.46 lakh during the corresponding period of 2015. In March alone, 78.72 lakh people flew in domestic carriers, an increase of 25.5%, compared with 62.85 lakh fliers in March 2015.

Experts attribute lower airfare and increasing purchasing power of people for the rise in  number of fliers. Though the number of passengers have increased in March, the seat occupancy in airlines have “slightly decreased” compared with February primarily due to the end of tourist season.

Vistara was the only airline to buck the trend and register an increase in seat occupancy from 73.9% in February to 74.7% last month. SpiceJet continued to have the highest seat occupancy at 91.1% compared with 92.3% in February. Air Pegasus registered the highest decline from 85.4% to 76.6%. National carrier Air India’s passenger load factor decreased to 75.7% from 79.9% while that of IndiGo was 85.1% (86% in February) and Jet Airways 79.1% (83%).

IndiGo continued to be the market leader cornering 37% of the business in the first three months of this year. In March, the airline cornered 38.4%.

Jet Airways and its subsidiary JetLite together have 20.9% while Air India’s market share was 15.4%. SpiceJet had 13%.  The overall cancellation rate of airlines was 1.29% with Air Pegasus topping the list with 40.34%. Air Costa came second with 18.28%.

During March, 737 passenger related complaints had been received by the airlines. The number of complaints per 10,000 passengers carried for the month of March 2016 has been 0.9. Here again, Air Pegasus was on the top.