Akasa Air travel tips

Despite India’s tremendous growth in aviation, the country remains a highly under-penetrated market, said Indian aviation minister Jyotiraditya Scindia.

Indian airlines will account for half of the country’s international passenger traffic by the 2027-28 financial year, according to a report by credit rating agency CRISIL Ratings. That’s up from 43% this fiscal year, with India’s international passenger traffic at around 70 million.

Flipkart-owned online travel company Cleartrip has launched ‘Out of Office’, a corporate travel management product. The product launch comes against the backdrop of Cleartrip’s aim to focus primarily with corporate booking travel.

Indian airlines inducted 112 aircraft in 2023, according to the Union Ministry of Civil Aviation. The ministry added that with this, the total number of aircraft in the fleets of scheduled airline operators stood at 771 as on December 31, 2023.

After a horrific start to January, Boeing has received a much needed boost. The good news has come from India where the country’s youngest carrier Akasa Air has ordered 150 Boeing 737 Max aircraft. The deal was confirmed at the aviation event Wings India 2024 on Thursday in Hyderabad. 

Singapore Airlines has refuted a media report saying it may raise its stake in Tata Group-owned Air India from the 25.1 percent which it secured as part of the group’s Vistara merger to create a bigger full-service national carrier. “The Mint story dated 16 June 2023 is incorrect. There (is) no change in SIA’s position from the November 2022 announcement,” Singapore Airlines said. Singapore’s state carrier’s statement was in response to a report by Indian daily Mint, which said the carrier had expressed its desire to gradually raise its stake in the Indian airline to about 40 percent. The media report, citing three people familiar with the development, stated Singapore Airlines and the Tata Group have had initial talks regarding the potential increase in stake. 

The number of foreign tourists who arrived in India this year from January to April is 166 percent higherthan a year earlier, Tourism Minister G Kishan Reddysaid at the inaugural session of the fourth G20 tourism working group meeting in Goa. “India’s inbound travel is expected to reach pre-pandemic level in 2023,” he said. Last year, the country received 6.19 million foreign tourist arrivals. Earningsfrom tourism more than doubled from $8 billion in 2021 to $16.4 billion in 2022, according to the government’s provisional estimates.

In a race to bring pilots onboard, India’s newest airline Akasa Air has reportedly raised pilots’ salary by up to 40% amid Tata-owned Air India and budget carrier IndiGo’s massive expansion plans with orders for hundreds of new aircraft.

Good morning from Skift. It’s Wednesday, August 2. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.

India’s newest airline Akasa Air has added a 20th aircraft to its fleet, making it eligible to fly internationally. The carrier, which will complete one year of operations on August 7, has also become the first airline in Asia to have the Boeing 737-8-200.

India’s youngest airline Akasa Air is looking to cover the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) countries, Southeast Asian countries and countries in the Middle East, co-founder Aditya Ghosh told CNBC TV18.