IndiGo is becoming a global airline, will also develop own catering products for intl customers: CEO Pieter Elbers
India market share is one of the highest for any airline in a domestic market across the world. But its larger strategy now is becoming a more global airline from a purely domestic one, Pieter Elbers, who was brought in as chief executive last year from Air France-KLM, tells Arindam Majumder. Edited excerpts:
Q. It has been a year of aggressive expansion adding international destinations where Indians hardly travelled before. Are those yielding money?
A: It is a strategy that we launched a year ago — that we build our own network, develop partnership, and expand connectivity.
The idea was to expand the domestic network which will complement the international connectivity as they connect to the rest of India via our hub in Delhi. That is what is nicely coming together. Before Covid we had around 350 routes, today we have 500.
Some of the routes like Nairobi and Jakarta are really doing well.
Q. Can IndiGo replicate the story of domestic growth in terms of connectivity in the international routes?
A: Absolutely. We started with the Middle East where most of the traffic was being carried by foreign airlines and now those are dominated by us.
Now we are going to places which were not connected before.
Through Nairobi, we have touched African soil. The same goes for Jakarta, and Central Asia. Those connections have also enabled some transit traffic via Delhi like from Tbilisi-Delhi-Phuket and I think that is very much in sync with the government policy to develop India as a global aviation hub and powerhouse.
