Premier global carrier Cathay Pacific has seen an upsurge in premium class travel to and fro India this year on the back of an improved international business environment, a senior airline executive has said.
In the first six months of this year, the demand for business class travel has gone up by 30 per cent, Tom Wright, Cathay's General Manager (India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Bhutan), told PTI here.
"The demand still looks good and it is in both the front-end and the back-end," he said, implying the demand for travel by business and economy classes.
"We had the problems with the front end (or business class), but that has now improved quite a bit. The demand is now fast coming back. For India, there is a 30 per cent growth in the premium class passenger traffic," Wright said.
Maintaining that the Hong Kong-based full-service airline had clocked considerable growth in its India operations, he said "we are basically now coming back to the level where we were in 2008 at 18 per cent overall growth. So
far things look quite encouraging and revenues have been very strong".
Wright said an "interesting thing" was that
destinations like Vietnam and Cambodia, which were not major for Indians earlier, were "now becoming very popular".
On reports about allowing foreign airlines to invest in Indian carriers, Wright said it would be meaningful for overseas carriers only if management control was allowed.
"Some airlines would probably not be interested in investing unless they are sure of control (management control). If it gives me the right to nominate me a chief executive and run the airline, may be that is one thing. But
if I am investing and if I don't have control, then it is a different relationship," he said.
The senior Cathay official said consolidation might occur in the domestic aviation industry, but consolidation in the sense that one Asian airline buying another Asian carrier was "still far away".
"At some point, in future, may be it will become genuinely a market where there will be such consolidation," hesaid, adding so far neither Cathay Pacific had approached any
carrier nor any carrier had approached it on the issue.
When asked whether the airline had any plan to expand its network in India, Wright said there was no scope as Cathay was using all permitted bilateral traffic rights.
The bilateral air service agreement, signed in 2008, allows it to operate 35 flights per week between Hong Kong and India.
"We had full capacity by July 2008. Now the Indian carriers have been slow to take up their allocations, but I think they will take it up at some point of time. So at this point of time, we have no scope for expansion," he said.
Wright said his company was watching the oil prices in India following the Government decision to de-regulate fuel rates.
"Fuel here has been expensive compared to other parts of the world. We will be watching it very closely, if fuel in India goes up suddenly dramatically," he said.
Wright, however, said any dramatic upward revision in aviation turbine fuel prices would have an impact on domestic carriers as they uplift fuel from the Indian market.
"I think it is important to keep the fuel surcharge separated from the ticket price because it continues to fluctuate with the fuel prices," he said, adding Hong Kong administration had a mechanism where fuel surcharge prices fluctuated with oil prices.