Heat or not, Indians are flying high
NEW DELHI : Indians are packing travel bags for summer, braving heat waves and steep fares as school vacations and annual holidays beckon. Air travel that hit a daily peak in April is expected to rise further as more travellers work out plans for May and June, cheering airlines and travel industry alike. While there is heightened demand for cooler destinations, places that are typically warm at this time are also seeing interest.
Searing heat has not affected air travel, and high demand has kept fares elevated, industry executives said. “We haven’t seen any impact on bookings or searches for the summer season on account of the heat wave. On the contrary, flight searches for May have seen an all-time high.
Domestic flight travel searches for May and June 2024 are up by 20%, and for international, they are up by 70% as compared to last year," said Aloke Bajpai, CEO of travel booking platform ixigo. Advance average air fares for a Delhi-Goa flight in May is around ₹5767, 6% higher than a year ago, ixigo data showed. Fares are 19% higher for Mumbai-Jaipur at ₹5,033, and up over 20% to ₹7200 for Delhi-Dharamshala.
Omnichannel travel platform Thomas Cook has also seen an increase of 10-30% in average advance fares to Sri Lanka and Nepal from various hubs such as Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Chennai for the upcoming summer, and an increased preference for Bhutan as well. For online travel platform Cleartrip, most popular destinations include Goa, Bagdodra, Srinagar, Port Blair, Varanasi, Bangkok, Phuket, Singapore, Dubai and Kuala Lumpur. "It is likely that the summer of May 2024 may see extremely high domestic air traffic, which could range between 13 million and 14 million passengers," said Aashish Gupta,
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