Domestic air traffic rises 4.8% to 126.48 lakh in Feb 2024

New Delhi: Domestic air traffic rose 4.8 percent on an annual basis to 126.48 lakh in February, while more than 1.55 lakh passengers were affected by flight delays during the same period, according to official data released on Friday.

In February, Air India's market share rose to 12.8 percent from 12.2 percent while that of IndiGo marginally dipped to 60.1 percent from 60.2 percent in January.

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The domestic air traffic climbed to 126.48 lakh in February compared to 120.69 lakh in the year-ago period, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) said.

However, the traffic was less than 1.31 crore reported in January.

"Passengers carried by domestic airlines during January - February 2024 were 257.78 lakh, as against 246.11 lakh during the corresponding period of the previous year thereby registering an annual growth of 4.74 percent and monthly growth of 4.80 percent," DGCA said.

As many as 1,55,387 passengers were affected due to flight delays in February and scheduled carriers shelled out Rs 222.11 lakh towards facilitation.

The DGCA also said that 29,143 passengers were impacted by cancellations and airlines spent Rs 99.96 lakh towards compensation and facilities.

Last month, a total of 917 passengers were affected due to denied boarding and the amount spent by the airlines for compensation and facilities in this regard was Rs 78.19 lakh.

A total of 791 passenger-related complaints were received by the scheduled domestic airlines in February and the number of complaints per 10,000 passengers carried was around 0.63.

The data showed that 37.8 percent of the passenger complaints were about flight problems, followed by baggage (19 percent), refund (16.3 percent) and customer service (11.1 percent), as per the data.

Last month, the domestic market share of SpiceJet dropped to 5.2 percent from 5.6 percent, Vistara and Akasa Air managed to maintain their share at 9.9 percent and 4.5 percent, respectively.

AIX Connect (formerly AirAsia India) cornered a market share of 6.1 percent in February, unchanged from the previous month, and similarly Alliance Air's share remained the same as the previous month at 1 percent.

According to the data, the On-Time Performance (OTP) of Air India was 56.4 percent while that of SpiceJet stood at 59.1 percent in February.

The OTP -- computed for the four metro airports of Bangalore, Delhi, Hyderabad, and Mumbai -- was 67.4 percent for Vistara, 72.7 percent for IndiGo and 72.9 percent for Akasa Air.

AIX Connect's OTP touched 73.5 percent in February.

"The overall cancellation rate of scheduled domestic airlines for the month of February 2024 has been 0.90 percent," DGCA said.

The cancellation rate was the highest for Zoom at 7.69 percent while it was the lowest for Akasa Air at 0.30 percent.

Among others, Fly Big's cancellation rate was 7.41 percent, Alliance Air (3.83 percent), Indiaone Air (3.18 percent), SpiceJet (1.54 percent), IndiGo (0.84 percent), AIX Connect (0.64 percent) and Air India (0.62 percent).

In the case of Star Air and Vistara, the cancellation rate was at 0.60 percent and 0.58 percent, respectively.

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