SriLankan Airlines expects to access three to four more key cities in India, including Ahmedabad, within the next one-year period, employing a two-pronged strategy of increasing frequency with a target of 200 weekly flights to India by 2025, according to SriLankan Airlines Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Richard Nuttall.
According to The Hindu, Nuttall said that the airline plans to increase the frequency of daily flights by double in order to generate more traffic to make use of the rise in spending power as well as the number of Indian nationals who can afford to travel against the backdrop of the economic growth in India.
The airline already operates flights to nine Indian cities: Chennai, Coimbatore, Madurai, Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Kochi, and Thiruvananthapuram, while three daily flights operate to Chennai alone.
“All major cities should be doubled daily. That should help grow traffic coming to Sri Lanka as well as beyond, particularly to Australia, Thailand, China, and Japan,” he said.
Hyderabad is among the cities to which frequency increase is under consideration by the airline. From the existing six flights a week to Hyderabad, SriLankan Airlines “should be trying to get towards double (the number of flights) daily. We need to be increasing (flights to) Hyderabad,” Nuttall said.
Referring to SriLankan Airlines’ plans, Nuttall said: “Probably, the obvious one will be Ahmedabad.. in 12 months,” adding that the airline would prefer to launch the flights earlier depending on how soon more aircraft are added to the fleet. Coimbatore, Kolkata, and Visakhapatnam are likely to be other cities to which the carrier is expected to fly.
Moreover, he said that the number of tourists expected to arrive in Sri Lanka from India is 1.5 million in 2023 while the monthly average of Indian tourists is expected to increase to 100,000 in the medium term from the current average of 25,000.
He said that SriLankan Airlines was the first to operate 100 flights a week to India, a number that is down to about 90 now.
On the matter of privatisation, Nuttal said that the Government of Sri Lanka is looking into whether the airline should be privatised or not. “They don’t want to take big decisions (as) somebody (who) wants to buy might want to have a say in what the model is going forward,” he said.