The Tata Group-owned Air India Express is firmly in the growth phase of its transformation programme ‘V1Rise’ to scale up its reach as well as capacity, the airline’s chief executive Aloke Singh told businessline.
At present, Air India Express is guided by a five-year transformation programme —‘V1Rise’ — which intends to make the airline into a major player in the domestic market while having a sizeable share in the regional international travel segment.
“In many ways, it (V1Rise) is equivalent to Air India’s ‘Vihaan.ai’ programme, serving as a comprehensive transformation strategy for the airline,” he said, adding that the ‘V1Rise’ programme has three distinct phases, “Synchronise, Scale, and Soar.”
“With the integration and merger of AIX Connect and Air India Express completed in October this year, the synchronise phase is behind us. We are now firmly in our growth phase, the scale-up of the airline’s fleet and network.”
Notably, businessline was the first to report about the existence of the ‘V1Rise’ programme in October.
According to Singh, the ‘Scale’ phase is seeing a rapid growth of the airline’s fleet.
“We are already at 90 aircraft and will end this fiscal year with over 100. On the back of this fleet expansion, we have increased our network footprint and started more than 35 new routes and several stations, such as Agartala, Port Blair, Jammu, and Bangkok, amongst others,” he said.
“As we scale up and as synergies with the AI group begin unlocking, we will soon be in the Soar phase of our journey—with a profitable, strong short-haul international and pan-India domestic network,” Singh said without divulging any timeline to achieve profitability targets.
In the financial year ending March 31, 2024, the airline (AIX Connect and Air India Express combined) carried over 46,000 passengers per day on average, with a domestic market share of about seven per cent.
“This represented a 20 per cent growth over the previous year. Today, in December, we carry on an average of 63,000 passengers daily, domestic and international together; our domestic market share has grown to nine per cent,” he said.
“In the current year, we estimate a robust growth of 25 per cent over the previous year.”
In terms of new market segments, Singh pointed out that the airline has adopted the strategy to directly connect tier-II and III destinations to international locations.
“Our connectivity from tier II and III cities directly to such markets is particularly interesting. We have just announced Bangkok services from Pune and Surat, and we are seeing very good traction. Going forward, we will launch many such routes,” he said.
“There are routes like Delhi–Dubai and Mumbai–Dubai that are better served by Air India, while Goa, Jaipur, and Surat to Dubai, or Delhi and Mumbai to Sharjah, are better suited to our business model.”
Besides, the airline’s primary focus will be on growing its domestic footprint in the tier-II and III cities.
“The two-thirds of the total domestic market is between metros and non-metros, which also happens to be the fastest-growing segment. Our current presence is largely in this segment. Of the 85-odd city pairs operated on the domestic market, the bulk of our services are between metros on one hand and tier II and III cities on the other,” Singh said.
“As we grow the domestic network, we will remain focused in this domain. This does not mean that we will be totally absent in the metro-to-metro markets, now or in the future. We may have off-peak time flights or operate flights from secondary airports.”
