A week after restart, flights to Bengaluru log low occupancy rate

BENGALURU: A week after domestic passenger flight operations resumed, passenger load on incoming flights to Bengaluru is still very low. In some instances, aircraft from Delhi carried fewer than 10 passengers.
Other sectors witnessing low passenger loads include Jaipur-Bengaluru and Pune-Bengaluru. An Air Asia flight from Bagdogra, for instance, arrived in Bengaluru with 10 passengers on Saturday.

According to information available with Centre for Asia-Pacific Aviation (CAPA), the load curve on domestic flights in the country has fallen after an initial high.Outgoing flights are seeing better occupancy with the exception of a few sectors, including Bengaluru-Kochi route. The Bengaluru-Kolkata route is one of the top flight routes, according to travel agents.
Due to the lockdown, several travellers were stuck in cities like New Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru which they visited for work or leisure. They are now heading to their hometowns — Patna, Jaipur, Lucknow, Ahmedabad, Varanasi and Guwahati, among others.
Sectors such as Bengaluru-Guwahati, Delhi-Patna and Mumbai-Varanasi are witnessing unusually high demand compared with busy routes like Delhi-Mumbai and Bengaluru-Delhi, said travel agents.
900 flights operated from KIA in a week
More than 900 flights were operated out of KIA from May 25 to 31. More than 420 flights have been cancelled in the period.
The airport is handling 10,000 domestic passengers a day on average, with the outgoing passenger load being more. Many passengers have been left in the lurch after their flight tickets were cancelled due to a low passenger load factor on certain sectors.
Sudhakara Reddy, president of the Air Passengers Association of India (APAI), said the quarantine restrictions in Karnataka led to the low number of incoming passengers because of the mandatory institutional quarantine.
The demand, however, continues for flights connecting metros and non-metros. Abhishek Rajan, senior vice-president at PaytmTravel, said, “With Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru as the origin cities, we are seeing a large number of bookings for places such as Patna, Guwahati, Varanasi, Bhubaneswar, Bagdogra, Lucknow and Ranchi. There is a surge in demand, and it will taper off with time...”
A SpiceJet spokesperson said, “As a policy, we do not share station-specific load factors.”