As we all know, the hike in the fuel prices led to hike in the domestic airlines prices. Thus, expensive tickets attracted fewer passengers. It is for the second month that the domestic airlines carried fewer passengers.

The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) recently released the latest data, which show that there has been a tremendous drop in the passengers which use to travel by domestic airlines. The 10 well known domestic airlines had 30.85 lakh passengers in the month of July, whereas during the same period in the previous year, the no. of passengers was 34.87lakh. The comparison shows that there has been a drop of 12% in the number of passengers traveling through these airlines.

Air-Deccan, which is considered to be quite low cost has actually seen the maximum drop in its passengers from 5.62 lakh passengers in July last year to 3.45 lakh this July. On the other hand, SpiceJet has experienced a marginal drop. It carried 13,000 lesser passengers in July at 2.55 lakh compared with the same period in the last year. When compared to the previous year, some other airlines such as Air India (domestic), Jet Airways and Go Air came to be some other airlines which saw a drop in the passenger traffic for the month of July.

However, Kingfisher Airlines somehow bucked the trend of carrying lesser passengers during the month of July this year, as it carried 17,000 more travelers during the month as compared to 4.52 lakh passengers during the same period previously.

The 100% subsidiary of Jet Airways, JetLite too carried 10,000 more passengers in the month of July. IndiGo on the other hand flew 44,000 more passengers at 3.20 lakh travelers in July this year.

According to Mr Kishore Gupta, the SpiceJet Director, “The three-month period starting July is the lean season in the domestic market.”