With fuel prices soaring, there's been an ongoing debate in Indian newspapers about whether the era of low cost airlines is over. As is evident globally, it's not as if eras start or get over in a jiffy.
Low cost airlines are here to stay as much are mobile telephony or the Internet.
It's just that there are phases the airline industry goes through and currently there is nothing cheap or low cost about air travel in India.
Last Sunday, a friend of mine took an Indigo flight to Chennai. It cost him Rs 6,200 inclusive of all taxes and surcharges. The fare of all the other carriers (barring Kingfisher) -- IC (erstwhile Indian), Jet, Jetlite, Air Deccan, SpiceJet -- was in the same range.
He took Indigo as the timing suited him. But as far as fares were concerned, there was nothing much to choose from.
To confirm what former Competition Commission Chairman Vinod Dhall has been saying in the media time and again, I did a random search on the Internet across various metro flight sectors and came up with the same conclusion: other than Kingfisher, there is very little difference in the fares being charged by all airlines in India.
Theoretically, lower fares do exist but are usually impossible to get when you actually want to fly. Dhall, who recently quit his job after five years of being with the Commission, certainly has a point here.
Although airlines in India have been crying hoarse about the fuel price rise, as far as I can see, it is mostly being passed onto the passengers.
Another friend of mine took a flight to Bangalore last week. He paid a basic fare of Rs 2,000, a fuel surcharge of Rs 2,900, a congestion charge of Rs 150, a passenger service fee of Rs 225 and a web transaction fee of Rs 50.
So, not only was the fuel surcharge higher than the basic fare, the surcharges and taxes were one and half times the basic fare.
Even as this column goes to press, airlines like Jet and Kingfisher are contemplating a further increase in fuel surcharge. So, who's bearing a substantial part of the cost of increased fuel prices here?
The airlines may be in trouble, but the fact that passengers are really not having it easy either is evident in the fact that this entire doubling or tripling of the cost of flying has happened in a matter of a few months.
This June, my family and I flew to Srinagar on a Jetlite flight (again Deccan and other options were available at roughly the same price; we took Jetlite as the timings suited us). This worked out to around Rs 10,000 per head.
This sounded astronomically high since last September a special promotion had allowed us to book five tickets for a total amount of Rs 10,000 on a Deccan flight to Srinagar (we couldn't make the trip, so we wasted the tickets and the money but at Rs 10,000 for five, one didn't really feel the pinch).
We paid for one ticket this June what we paid last September for all five tickets.
Moreover, as things stand today, there's no comparison between air travel and Lalu Prasad's railway fares (his trains win hands down). Before deciding on Kashmir, we explored flying down to Dharamsala and then driving further up.
Two weeks before the flight, Air Deccan return tickets to Dharamsala were costing Rs 14,000 per person -- anything but comparable to rail travel. By train, you board at night, pay some Rs 1,000-odd, sleep the night through and land up in the morning at Pathankot. To reach Dharamsala, one can take a taxi from there. Divide that between four or five people and the cost of the taxi becomes insignificant.
So, the next time you hear one of the low-cost carriers' CEOs holding forth on how his airline's fares are comparable with train fares, take what he says with a large pinch of salt.
In almost all cases, it is more expensive to fly in India than within most other countries in the region, even on low fare carriers. Earlier this year, I was in Thailand and a flight from Bangkok's Don Muang airport to Krabi (a flight of around one hour and twenty minutes) cost us Rs 2,500 per head one way on Nok Air, one of the budget carriers in Thailand.
The airline's charges do vary depending on season but that's roughly half the cost of a similar duration flight to Srinagar on Jetlite.
This has been true for a while now but many international routes are cheaper despite far longer flying time. Colombo, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, Dubai are usually cheaper to fly to than to, say, Kochi, Trivandrum and Sikkim from the main metro cities in India.
So, here's primarily what I am saying : as things stand today, there is no real fare difference between low-cost and full fare airlines, barring Kingfisher -- the taxes and surcharges (and in most cases the fuel surcharge alone) exceeds the basic fare.
The cost of flying in India has at least tripled in the last 8-10 months; there is absolutely no comparison with railway fares; it is more expensive to fly within India than within most countries in the region and it may be cheaper or equivalent for you to take a holiday to a nearby country than within India.
If CEOs of any Indian airlines disagree, I'd love to hear from them.
