The country’s first ever partially biojet fuel-powered aircraft took off from Dehradun, Uttarakhand, on August 27, and landed successfully in New Delhi. The 72-seater Bombardier Q400 belonged to SpiceJet, India’s fourth-largest airline by market share, and used a blend of 75% aviation turbine fuel (ATF).

“It (biojet fuel) has the potential to reduce our dependence on traditional aviation fuel by up to 50% on every flight,” Ajay Singh, chairman and managing director of SpiceJet, said in a press release.

The biofuel used by SpiceJet to mark this momentous flight was developed by the Indian Institute of Petroleum, Dehradun, from the seed of the jatropha crop. It meets the specification of aircraft engine makers Pratt & Whitney and Bombardier, SpiceJet said, and can potentially reduce the airline’s carbon footprint by 15%.

Image source: Conde Nast Traveller

This is not the first time an airline has experimented with biofuel. In 2011, Alaska Airlines operated 75 selected flights on a cooking oil blend, while Dutch airline KLM flew weekly biofuel flights between New York and Amsterdam for six months in 2013.

India is expected to become the world’s third-biggest aviation market by 2025 on the back of a domestic-travel boom. That is now leading to fierce competition and a bruising fare war, that is hurting profits of airlines.

Most airlines in India are under pressure from a depreciating rupee and surging fuel prices. Besides, domestic carriers are mostly pursuing volume over profitability. With airlines flying so many flights, fuel demand has surged. In the April-June quarter, some of the biggest players incurred massive losses. While net profits of IndiGo, India’s largest airline by market share, spiraled down 97% year-on-year to Rs 28 crore ($4 million), Spicejet reported a loss of Rs 38.06 crore. Jet Airways’ losses stood at Rs 1,323 crore with its fuel expenses rising 35%.

It is interesting to note that back in 2013-14, SpiceJet’s rival, IndiGo, had toyed with the idea of using biofuel to power some of its fleet, before deciding to shelve the plan. Back then Indigo considered biofuel to be a cheaper alternative to ATF idf oil prices continued to rise. But at that time it was cheaper and more convenient for them to import jet fuel from Singapore, leading to the plan being shelved.

According to IATA, aviation industry contributes to 2% of the total greenhouse gas emissions in the world which will rise as the aviation industry is expanding. IATA has set a target for one billion passengers to fly on aircraft using a mix of clean energy and fossil fuels by 2025.
IATA has set targets to mitigate carbon emissions from air transport — an average improvement in fuel efficiency of 1.5% per year from 2009 to 2020, a cap on net aviation carbon emissions from 2020 (carbon-neutral growth) and a reduction in net aviation carbon emissions of 50% by 2050, relative to 2005 levels. With the introduction of biofuel to its fleet, SpiceJet says it hopes to be much ahead of these targets.

The move is a good start to address concerns around the poor health of the aviation sector. Under these circumstances, Bio jet fuel has the potential to halve the fuel cost of every flight and bring down fares. Nitin Gadkari also said that a cabinet note would soon be moved to come out with a special policy on the use of biofuel in the aviation sector. With a strong government policy in place and efforts from airlines like SpiceJet to experiment, biofuel will hopefully usher in a new era of reducing dependence on oil in a highly price-sensitive industry.

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The airlines industry’s biggest enemy is back again. During the past 12 months, Brent crude price has jumped 54.22% to $76.86 a barrel, while jet fuel prices have risen more than 28%. During the same period, the rupee weakened 3.85% against the dollar.

This has prompted most airlines to raise flight ticket prices, cut non-fuel costs and boost non-aeronautical revenue to offset the impact of rising fuel costs and a weakening rupee. IndiGo (Interglobe Aviation Ltd) was the first to hike flight fares by levying a fuel surcharge of as much as ₹400 on domestic routes from 30 May to offset higher costs.

SpiceJet is also planning to diversify its activities beyond “pure aviation” to protect itself from the high risks associated with the aviation sector, and will soon announce forays into a dedicated freight business in cargo and courier logistics. This could be a first for an Indian airline.The airline also plans to develop digital aviation and travel products. They are both likely to be in collaboration with international partners.

“We believe that we must hedge ourselves from the risk of being in a pure aviation business and find businesses which are connected to aviation but which could be a little more insulated from the high cost of fuel,” said SpiceJet co-founder and CEO Ajay Singh in a statement, adding, “so we are looking at some new areas.”

Jet Airways is seeing worse. The reports of full-service carrier’s grounding in the next 60 days owing to severe resource crunch have stirred the aviation sector. The airline has refuted the reports but the speculations are flying thick and fast. Some reports also suggested that Jet has asked employees to take salary cut of between 5 and 25 per cent to slash operating expenses.

The problem with these airlines is no different from the rest of the industry. American Airlines CEO Doug Parker offered a warning to the flying public – fuel costs are skyrocketing and that extra cost will be passed onto the consumer with more expensive ticket prices. Fuel constitutes 35-50% of an airline’s total costs. Airlines in India also make payments in dollars for salaries of expatriates, for maintenance and overhaul, purchase of new aircraft and for buying jet fuel. However, with India being a price-sensitive market in the commercial aviation segment, airlines often struggle to pass on costs to customers.

According to the fifth annual Global Travel Forecast, published by GBTA and CWT with the support of the Carlson Family Foundation, Asia Pacific expects to see a 3.2% rise in 2019 pricing. Chinese demand remains high and by 2020 the country is expected to become the world’s biggest air travel market. In 2019 the country’s flights are seen going up 3.9%.

But China will not be alone. The vast majority of countries in the region will see price rises, especially in markets like New Zealand (7.5%) and India (7.3%). The latter is expected to be the world’s third largest aviation market by 2025, with airports operating beyond capacity. The only exception in this booming region is Japan. Prices there will likely drop 3.9% due to the country’s added capacity in preparation for the Olympic Games in 2020.

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As the travel space expands invariably, Malaysia-based Global Rooms is exploring a partnership with domestic low-cost carrier SpiceJet to sell its niche segment NIDA Rooms. This move came in to cater the tourism that is flocking in from South East Asia to India.  Global Rooms is the parent company of NIDA Rooms. It commenced its operation in September last year and is currently in the final stages of raising a round of USD 3-3.5 million funding to spread its reach in other markets such as Vietnam, China, besides India.

(Image: Image by amalakar/ CC BY 2.0)

Company’s Co-Founder Kaneswaram Avili, also the former chief commercial officer for SpiceJet was one of the several senior SpiceJet executives who parted ways with the Gurgaon-based airline after current promoter Ajay Singh took control of the carrier from Maran’s family early last year.

With Global Rooms partnering with SpiceJet, he adds;

“Flight plus hotel products have a big demand and, therefore, partnering with an airline makes a lot of sense. Spicejet is a strong brand in the category we are participating. We are actively looking at forging a partnership with the airline to promote our niche product,”

Avili had founded the company with former Credit Suisse executive Dennis Melka last year in August. He was a part of no-frills AirAsia and later Tony Fernandes’ Tune Hotels. The business model of Global Rooms aims to help both low cost airlines and budget hotels. The occupancy rate of hotels across South East Asia remains 60% with about 40% lying vacant. The idea is to collate that 40% and bring it into productive use by increasing the occupancy rate.

The company has tied up with 3000 hotels, five rooms in each hotel, pan Asia including Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines and Thailand. Avili shares his plans to expand the sector in Latin America realising its full potential to tap the market. He said his company had mopped up a seed capital of 1.3 million USD and is in the final stage to raise another 3-3.5 million USD.

This move could be the right step as the low cost carriers try to minimise the role of OTAs and attract more direct bookings. A traveller looking for flights and hotels would prefer OTA than booking the flight with the carrier and hotel with an OTA. Offering more than just flights would reduce the dependence of travellers on other services to book hotels and could possibly have a long term advantage for SpiceJet.

Source: MoneyControl

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Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation is well-known for changing the face of the railway ticketing in India. It has laid the groundwork for internet-based railway ticket booking through its website. This year IRCTC has been an exceptionally active player in the travel industry.

(Image: Electric locomotive of Indian Railways by Shan H Fernandes)

Over the past few months, IRCTC has tied up with innumerable indian and international brands to further enhance its business and fulfil the requirements of the travellers. Let us go through a few of them below:

 YatraGenie

Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation collaborated with YatraGenie – a Bengaluru-based online bus ticketing and cab-booking platform. Through this tie-up, YatraGenie offers cab services to the passengers from Secundarabad station. This gives the liberty to the passengers to book cabs at the last minute from the station and reach their respective destinations with absolute ease.

 MobiKwik and Paytm

MobiKwik offers an instant one-tap payment method for ticket bookings. The users can carry out seamless online payments from the retailer’s platform with no redirection to the app. It has tied up with Paytm to make e-catering payment an easy option for the travellers.

Amazon and Mydala

IRCTC tied up with Amazon to provide the convenient online shopping experience to its customers. Through the app, the passengers are offered a variety of products ranging from consumer electronics to musical instruments. In the similar category, they joined hands with Mydala to provide deals and offers across categories like health and wellness, tattoos and retail shopping to its customers.

 KFC and Dominos

Recently, IRCTC has also associated with leading fast-food chains like KFC and Dominos. Currently, IRCTC provides an e-catering facility in 1516 trains without pantry cars.The KFC and Dominos services are available in trains running via New Delhi Railway Station. Passengers can place their orders through the IRCTC website or call on a toll-free number.  It is also planning to collaborate with food aggregators like Subway and Pizza Hut.

Foodpanda and Hello Curry

IRCTC has connected with many food tech startups in the past few months. A few of them include Foodpanda and Hello Curry. With these tie-ups, the two food tech startups have enabled the passengers to order from a variety of cuisine options during their travel. Foodpanda provides customers with the choice to order meals a few hours before their travel. The Foodpanda services are available currently only in Delhi whereas Hello Curry offers wholesome healthy meal options to passengers boarding different trains at Secunderbad station.

GoAir and Spicejet

IRCTC associated with the GoAir and Spicejet to assist train travellers with wait-listed tickets to book flight tickets by charging an incremental fee. The passengers get an opportunity to avail  tickets at a lower price as compared to standard price rates. Interested people can book flight tickets three days prior to their travel date, after cancelling their train tickets.

In this year, IRCTC has been seen joining hands with many players in different verticals to assist the travellers through its widely-available services.

Related Article: Foodpanda partners with IRCTC to offer food in trains

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Only a few months after SpiceJet introduced the special discounted fares for passengers travelling without check-in luggage, DGCA has finally allowed domestic carriers to roll out ‘zero bag’ fares. They will now be allowed to charge penalty against the baggage for tickets booked under zero bag fares.

All the domestic operators allow up to 15 kgs of check-in luggage (except Air India which allows 23 kgs).

“Airlines are allowed to offer no check-in baggage/hand baggage only fare scheme subject to the condition that the penalty to be imposed on a passenger, who avails such schemes but turns up with baggage for check-in at airline counter, cannot exceed the amount of incentive offered compared to lowest fare,” Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) said in its updated Air Transport Circular for unbundling of services.

Domestic carriers IndiGo, SpiceJet and AirAsia India had approached DGCA earlier with the “zero bag fare” but the plea was rejected after civil aviation ministry asked it to not allow the same. With this new development, SpiceJet commented that the move is in line with the changing trends in the industry. The SpiceJet scheme offered a discount of INR 200 to every passenger booking flight with no check-in luggage and just one handbag. However if they decide to carry check-in baggage, the fee was INR 500 for up to 10 kgs and INR 750 for up to 15 kgs.

With this new regulation in place, we will see domestic airlines come up with more offers for travellers travelling without check-in luggage. Business travellers take short haul flights for work and they often travel with just their handbag. These travellers will benefit from the ‘Zero bag’ fares. Such regulations will also motivate travellers to travel light thus speeding up the processes at airport and also saving airlines some fuel costs. Expect the domestic carriers to come up with attractive zero bag discounts after this announcement.

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The competition between low cost carriers in India is intense. Everyone is trying to get the biggest possible share out of the increasing number of domestic airline travellers. The space is dominated by IndiGo but SpiceJet and AirAsia India are two strong players.

Sanjiv Kapoor, the COO of SpiceJet recently took an AirAsia India flight and went to Twitter to appreciate their service and hospitality. He thanked their CEO Mittu Chadilya and his team for the experience in his tweet. Mittu Chadilya also reciprocated and thanked him for the same on Twitter. Only a few days before the tweet, Sanjiv Kapoor shared photos from Paro of a Druk Airline flight he took with Mittu Chandilya.

(Read: The young Indian who pilots AirAsia: Mittu Chandilya, CEO, AirAsia India)

Fantastic warmth and hospitality on @airasiain today, felt I was on @flyspicejet! Thanks @MittuChandilya and team! pic.twitter.com/LdgHZb03pT

— Sanjiv Kapoor (@SanjivKapoor90) September 2, 2015

Thanks @SanjivKapoor90 was a pleasure having you onboard. Hope to see you again https://t.co/4eI8ba3b1H

— Mittu Chandilya (@MittuChandilya) September 2, 2015

Paro runway as viewed on breath-taking approach. With lovely crew of Druk Air and @MittuChandilya on an MMT outing. pic.twitter.com/7C6qi3W5GG

— Sanjiv Kapoor (@SanjivKapoor90) August 29, 2015

The budget airline segment in India sees a lot of activity with Airlines competing against each other on price in a bid to achieve higher load factor. The overall domestic air passenger traffic took a jump of 29 percent during July to 67.45 lakh from 52.16 lakh with SpiceJet utilising 93.4 percent of its capacity. AirAsia India was running at a relatively lower 80.2 percent load. According to IATA, this increase in passenger traffic indicates improved connectivity and will contribute to the government’s efforts to make it easier to do business in India.

It is great to see brotherhood prevailing among the players in this highly competitive space though it appears to be in contrast with what happened last year. There was some friction in the industry when AirAsia entered the Indian airline industry last year. AirAsia chief Tony Fernandes hit out at IndiGo, the biggest player in Indian airline industry, for being a bully about the entry of AirAsia in India. SpiceJet COO Sanjiv Kapoor wrote about AirAsia in internal mails. He also took to Twitter to slam the new ‘foreigner’ for changing strategy every month and claiming full planes when they were running in low 70s. We have seen international carriers to get into spats openly but this was something new for the Indian market.

Interesting to see the new entrant foreign airline change strategy every month and claim full planes when loads in the low 70s…

— Sanjiv Kapoor (@SanjivKapoor90) September 26, 2014

Low cost Airlines like SpiceJet and AirAsia India have been trying to lure passengers this year by offering very attractive flight deals. SpiceJet hosted flash sale for airline tickets earlier this year which was something new for the industry while AirAsia offered flight tickets across multiple routes starting at INR 999. The changing relations between these two low cost carriers could indicate good times ahead for the Indian aviation industry.

Featured image: SpiceJet by rapidtravelchai/ CC BY 2.0

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Decoding a brand’s reputation management on social media is a tricky proposition for the entire hospitality industry. The number of negative comments and flight-delay queries from customers can easily out-number the occasional appreciation that comes in between.

However to the delight of SpiceJet, this post by Kiruba Shankar, an entrepreneur & a popular Chennai based social media influencer is actually being shared for a positive reason As stated in his post, Kiruba has appreciated the quick action shown by the entire crew of SpiceJet during his recent flight from Kolkatta to Chennai.

The air hostesses of the airline SG622 went all out to the aid of a shivering passenger who could barely speak during the flight. The way the entire crew handled an emergency situation was appreciated not just by the passengers but is now being shared all over the internet through this post.

At the time of publishing this story, the post had received close to 1500 shares and over 13,300+ likes.

Kiruba’s post about the incident on his FB profile

Why is this post going viral?

As consumers, we love reading stories on social media, more so when stories are emotional and actually touch our hearts! This post by Kiruba is a real-life story and a classic demonstration of how a brand’s employees have gone all out to help a fellow passenger. It also shows that relationships between a brand and a customer are made by real life human beings on either side and not by those meticulously planned advertisement campaigns. When customers do go through a positive experience, they want to share it with everyone in the world and that’s why social media becomes an obvious choice.

This tweet below is another demonstration on why social media users value emotions big-time. It was made by a doctor whose father was served by the air-hostess of another SpiceJet flight. The moving picture was RTed by over 39 twitter users.

Spicejet stewardess Aarti feeding my elderly father on flight 413 from MUM to BLR. Very touched by gesture. Thank you pic.twitter.com/zycvskwZQV

— Dr Hemant Vadeyar (@Liver_Surgeon) August 23, 2015

While neither SpiceJet or Kiruba expected the story to go viral, we would say a job well done

Update: The story has now been mentioned in SpiceJet’s inflight magazine by their COO, Sanjiv Kapoor

Credit: Kiruba Shankar’s post on Facebook

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What could perhaps be termed as a first for the airlines industry in India, Spicejet has announced its Mobile App only Flash Sale in a bid to promote downloads of the application on Android/iOS platforms. Spicejet’s fresh sale, comes after the recent announcement of their hand-baggage only discounted fares for passengers who are travelling with cabin baggage only.

While Mobile only sale is a new beginning for airlines, most OTAs in India, consistently use mobile promotions to drive domestic hotel sales and last minute purchases.

Few points:

• The sale will be applicable only on the Spicejet Mobile app and not on the website.
• There are more than 1 lakh one-way tickets available at Rs.1 (excluding taxes and fees).
• The twist is that you need to make a round-trip purchase, where the other leg of journey comes at regular fare.

A screenshot of SpiceJet’s Mobile App on iOS platform.

The sale goes live later today i.e. on 15 July 2015 at around 10am.

Twitter has already started buzzing with conversations about the sale with tweets from several influencers.

Tomorrow at 10 am @flyspicejet is offering Re 1 tickets on its app http://t.co/axibJ7Yn48

— Amith P (@amithpr) July 14, 2015

Smart ways of direct customer acquisition via smart phones. @flyspicejet brings Re1 fares http://t.co/bnGxYiiIBO #avgeek #Airfare @livemint

— P. R. SANJAI (@talktosanjai) July 14, 2015

Last year, in Dec. 2014 Goibibo.com, had become the first player in the Indian OTA space to announce its mobile referral program. Way back in May 2013, there was big news of MakeMyTrip becoming the first OTA to achieve 1 million app downloads.

Do you think that other airlines will follow the trend soon by announcing their app-only flash sales?

News Credit: SpiceJet offers Re. 1 ticket on Mobile App

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