India's recovery has been sharper than the rest of the world, says British Airways CEO
British Airways (BA), the national carrier of the UK is one of the largest airlines in the world. Sean Doyle who has been with BA for 20 years took over as CEO in Oct-2020. In this interview with Arindam Majumder, Doyle speaks on the recovery from pandemic and its growth plans in India.
Edited excerpts:Has British Airways completed its recovery from the lows of pandemic?The pandemic was a much bigger issue to deal with than 9/11. I don’t think there is anybody who would have anticipated that the industry would shut down for two years. The recovery is underway.
British Airways will fly about 92% of its pre pandemic capacity this year. We are very encouraged with the recovery we are showing. Demand has been strong.
Rebound has been very sharp and every airline is back to flying as many aircraft as they can.What is the situation for turnaround in business travel which primarily fills up the front end of the cabin?At the moment, every cabin is pretty full. The mix of traffic is a little different because we have more people flying for leisure and personal travel. Corporate demand is not yet back to pre-pandemic level.
For us, it was important to get back into the critical markets very quickly. So we reestablished our presence in the US and even added a couple of new cities- Cincinnati and Portland. Similarly India was a priority market for us as this is our second largest market.
Asia has been a bit slow to come back except India. We have now started operating in Japan and Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai. But operations there have a new set of challenges as a result of the restriction on airspace due to the Ukraine situation.
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