To prepare for the travel uptick, India may need to add as many as 120 planes each year.
According to the South Asian country’s second-largest online travel agency, Indians are now vacationing lavishly, spending more on five-star hotels and booking business class seats as the country emerges from the coronavirus pandemic that has curbed travel for two years .
“People live their lives and spend money on travel,” Prashant Pitti, co-founder of EaseMyTrip, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television on Monday. “It’s a shift that’s happening for good, for the long haul.”
More and more Indians are taking to the skies as travel restrictions ease and the country opens the way to international travel, with millions of people trapped at home experiencing an increasing need for travel. India, the world’s fastest growing major aviation market before the pandemic, expects local traffic to exceed the pre-pandemic level of 415,000 daily fliers within a year. Indian airlines are also adding capacity to accommodate the rebound in demand as international flights resume from Sunday.
To prepare for the uptick in travel, India may need to add as many as 120 planes a year, India’s Civil Aviation Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia said last week, urging local airlines to expand their fleet of widebody aircraft. necessary for international operations.
Bookings for business class seats on flights and five-star hotels have already doubled compared to pre-pandemic numbers as a percentage of total reservations, Pitti said. Indians are now planning holidays averaging 4.7 days, compared to 3.2 days before Covid, he said. EaseMyTrip is operated by Easy Trip Planners Ltd. and offers online bookings for flights, trains, hotels, buses and taxis.
EaseMyTrip, which sold shares to the public last year, will continue to grow profitably, Pitti said. The company’s net income likely surpassed rupees 9 billion ($118 million) for the year ended March 31, a jump from rupees 6.1 billion ($80 million) last year, he said.
While airfare rates have risen “pretty dramatically” in recent weeks as airlines tried to offset the rise in oil prices, the rise will be short-lived, Pitti said.
“India looks great, lining up to recover very quickly from the onslaught we’ve all been through over the past two years,” he said. “The pent-up demand will not diminish in the coming years.”
