Hope airfares come to right sweet spot, says Vistara CEO

Emphasising that airfare is a function of supply and demand, full-service carrier Vistara’s chief Vinod Kannan has expressed hope that ticket prices will come to the “right sweet spot where customers will travel and airlines can make money”.

Emphasising that airfare is a function of supply and demand, full-service carrier Vistara's chief Vinod Kannan has expressed hope that ticket prices will come to the "right sweet spot where customers will travel and airlines can make money".

Vistara, a joint venture between Tata Group and Singapore Airlines, currently, operates around 320 flights daily.

To a query on concerns in certain quarters about air ticket prices going irrationally high, the airline CEO said the thing with airfares is that people complain when it goes high and no one compliments when it goes down.

"There are times in the year due to seasonality...our fares in 2023 were even lower than 2022," he noted.

During an interaction with PTI, Mr. Kannan said that certain measures are in place to ensure that airfares are not irrational, especially when there are natural calamities or when something unfortunate happens.

In such situations, "we want to make sure that it is not a price-gouging opportunity," he said.

"If you look at it on a year-on-year basis, the average price of a ticket, in fact, for the last 20 years, has not changed between Delhi and Mumbai. If you look at the average fare a person paid in the early 2000s and compared to how much they pay today, you will find there is not much of a change, but costs have gone up," Mr. Kannan noted.