Yatra.com Blog

In times like these when downturn has hit everyone hard there is nothing like getting a great travel deal to help you beat the trend and fulfill you and your families’ vacation desires. So it was music to the ears that most of the airlines in India have slashed the fares across all sectors. The drop in oil prices was the obvious reason for this phenomenon. Interestingly the budget airlines were the first to drop the prices and quite aggressively too. The Full service airlines are crying foul. This development is quite amusing because the big fishes are getting nervous of their small counterparts; an unseen trend. Typically predatory pricing is adopted by the big companies with deep pockets to clean out competition in the market as they can sustain losses for longer periods. However in this case the supposedly big pocketed companies are on the defensive. One can argue that they charge premium for the full service flights they offer and that majority of consumers in India are sensitive to the price and are not interested in paying the premium. But this does not explain the aggressive hiring of the low cost carriers in 2009. On one hand they lower their prices to levels where profitability is hard to achieve with the kind of occupancy they are running at and on the other hand they start hiring in a big way and add new routes and flights. Whatever might be the reason, but the key take-away for the travelers is better value for the buck at least in the near future.

Swapnil