Troubled low-cost airline SpiceJet is suspending services to six cities — Aurangabad, Belgaum, Indore, Lucknow, Surat and Thiruvanthapuram — as part of its summer schedule announced on Wednesday. Services to these cities may resume later when the airline adds more aircraft to its fleet.
As part of the new schedule, and to maximise network efficiency with the planned summer fleet, SpiceJet is suspending services to these cities, the airline said. However, the new summer schedule, effective March 29, 2015, has introduced new flights with additional frequency.
SpiceJet will be introducing two new daily flights to Dubai, from Amritsar and Mangalore. These flights are in addition to the five existing flights already to Dubai from Delhi, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Kochi and Madurai, taking SpiceJet’s service to Dubai to seven flights daily.
Dubai is SpiceJet’s number one international destination in terms of capacity, out of the eight international cities currently served by it, namely Bangkok, Colombo, Kabul, Kathmandu, Male (Maldives), Muscat, and Sharjah. On the domestic front, SpiceJet is adding a new flight between Chennai and Vijayawada.
The airline is also adding frequencies to a number of domestic routes. The frequency of flights has been increased between Delhi and Amritsar (now twice daily), Bangalore and Mangalore (now three times daily), Mumbai and Jabalpur (twice daily), Delhi and Jabalpur (two times daily), Delhi and Dehradun (three times daily), Delhi and Dharamshala (twice daily), Delhi and Jaipur (three times daily), Delhi and Srinagar (three times daily), Delhi and Udaipur (twice daily), Hyderabad and Tirupati (three times daily) and Jammu and Srinagar (twice daily).
Sanjiv Kapoor, chief operating officer, SpiceJet, said: “The new flights to Dubai are a reflection of our success in that market, and will utilise all of our available traffic rights to the city. With these flights, we will have one of the most extensive networks from India to Dubai, especially from non-metro cities.”
The new frequencies on domestic sectors reflect the airline’s confidence that future growth and value lie in providing more connectivity to non-metros and tier-2 cities, which is where much of the economic growth of the country is increasingly coming from, he added.
All of these flights will offer SpiceMAX, the leading ‘extra legroom’ economy class seats in India today, available on all SpiceJet aircraft.
On the Boeing 737, SpiceJet has five rows of seats with 6-inch greater legroom than regular economy class seats for a modest premium.