Demand for travel to smaller cities drives passenger growth at Bengaluru airport
The Hindu
The country’s third-largest airport in terms of passenger traffic, the Bengaluru International Airport, has seen a rapid proliferation of travel to domestic destinations since COVID-19, spurred by a demand for travel to smaller cities.
The country’s third-largest airport in terms of passenger traffic, the Bengaluru International Airport, has seen a rapid proliferation of travel to domestic destinations since COVID-19, spurred by a demand for travel to smaller cities.
Before Covid-19, the airport’s share of passengers traveling to metropolitan cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Chennai accounted for 75% of total passengers, which has now shrunk to 42% as the share of non-metro travellers grew from 25% to 58%, explains the airport’s Chief Operating Officer, Satyaki Raghunath in an interview to The Hindu. The airport recorded 28.12 million domestic passengers out of a total 31.91 passengers in the financial year 2022-2023.
The demand from these travellers during Covid-19, when train travel was no longer a preferred choice for many due to health safety protocols, also often led to airlines opening new routes and later providing more frequencies on them.
“So, we have gone from 54 domestic destinations to 74. We are now connected to Jamnagar(Gujarat), Jaisalmer (Rajasthan), Bareilly (Uttar Pradesh), Agartala (Tripura), Jharsuguda (Odisha). Five years back you couldn’t have imagined that there would be a direct flight to these cities from Bengaluru,” says Mr. Raghunath.
These far-flung towns account for 45% of the total non-metro traffic from Bengaluru, while Jaipur, Lucknow, Pune and Goa constitute 30% of the total non-metro traffic. The remaining 25% of the traffic is to cities such as Trichy, Salem and Vizag which are within the 75-minute flying distance.
The number of domestic passengers at the airport is now at 105% of the pre-COVID level. International passengers, who were at 3.78 million last fiscal, though continue to lag behind by around 10% as foreign carriers are yet to restore capacity to the levels seen in 2019-2020 due to supply-chain constraints as well as because of the Russia-Ukraine conflict which has closed a part of the European sky. However, by the end of this fiscal the airport is expected to exceed the pre-Covid passenger number of 33 million and record between 36 million to 37 million total passengers, the top executive says.
The growing passenger numbers at the airport, along with a large number of corporate travellers, also make the airport attractive to long-haul international carriers such as German carrier Lufthansa which launched a new flight to Munich earlier this month with its Airbus A350-900 aircraft, which also has a first-class cabin.
Flight AI177 will depart Bengaluru at 1.05 p.m. and arrive at London Gatwick at 7.05 p.m. (local time). From London Gatwick, flight AI178 will depart at 8.35 p.m. (local time) and arrive in Bengaluru at 10.50 a.m. (next day arrival). From Bengaluru, the flight will operate on Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays.