Even with the reduced number of aircraft, the king of good times, Kingfisher, hardly has passengers to fly. The carrier?s seat factor on various routes, including the busy ones like Mumbai and Delhi, has been lower than 50% these days even as the number of flights has been reduced from 64 to 16 for the summer schedule. The reasons are obvious as there are massive cancellations due to the uncertainty over the future of the airline.
On routes like Lucknow, Kochi, seat factors have been so low that the carrier has decided to withdraw the operations completely. It has stopped flying from Kolkata and Hyderabad as well. While, some of it could be due to lesser number of aircraft, the airport officials said, it was mainly because there were hardly passengers on board.
The travel industry experts, however, feel that the 50% is good enough for the airline that has been struggling to remain operational. “Even to get 50%, after what all have been said about the airline, it is quite good. The carrier is trying to bring more passengers on its aircraft by selling cheaper,” Ankur Bhatia, executive director of Bird Group, said.
The carrier had a load factor of about 80% in February and 70% in January. Usually, from April-June, the load factor for all the airlines shoot up to 90% due to holiday season. And, considering there are not many options for the Indian passengers, the load factor may push up for the Kingfisher as well, depending on its strategy likely to be announced by its chief Vijay Mallya on Tuesday.
?Passengers are flying Kingfisher only when there is no other option. The airline has managed to get some people on board also because of the pricing. They (Kingfisher) has priced slightly lower then Jet Airways,? Sabina Chopra, co founder and executive vice president (operations) of travel portal yatra.com said.
The cash-strapped carrier last week announced closing down of all international operations from April 10, 2012. While, the flights to Dubai, Colmbo, Kathmandu and Bankok have already been stopped, its Delhi-London flight would be the last one on April 10, 2012.
The carrier has huge debt of about R7,000 crore. Of this, it owes around R5,600 to the consortium of 13 public sector banks including State Bank of India. The airline is also sitting on an accumulated loss of R6,000 crore. Last week, in its meeting with the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), the aviation minister Ajit Singh had said that the government will take a decision on Kingfisher after the report is submitted to the ministry.
An email sent to the airline, remain unanswered.
The stock prices of the airline fell record low by 6.69% at R16.75 on Monday mainly due to the buzz that the government may soon ground the airline.