SriLankan Airlines is said to commence operations from three additional cities in India, including Ahmedabad.
SriLankan Airlines currently flies to nine Indian cities.
On a recent visit to India, SriLankan Airlines’ CEO Richard Nuttall told India’s Mint that Indians accounted for nearly 390,000 tourists in 2019.
During the political turmoil, Nuttall said Sri Lanka relied heavily on Indian airports to help them fuel up since they did not get aviation fuel for two months.
SriLanka has launched a new marketing campaign ‘Dil Full of Sri Lanka’ where it’s bundling one plus one tickets for flyers along with four and five star hotel stays at lower costs and has tied up with select travel agents to retail these.
Nuttall said “We are currently flying to nine destinations in India and we intend to add three new destinations. Before the pandemic, we were the third largest international airline flying out of India”.
The challenge, he said, would be to bring tourism back to the country now. “We are also doing a media campaign in the India market as well which is live on radio, print and digital across India,” he added. In a week, the airline does about 60-75 flights to and from India.
“There was an overblown global coverage of our political crisis. But as an airline industry, by being very tactical about where we fly, we may likely break even by the end of this financial year and have the best financial performance we have had in this year,” said Nuttall.
When it did not have any aviation fuel for two months, the company stopped over in India to take fuel stops to buy jet fuel from vendors in Chennai and started to tanker fuel from here. “Indian authorities understood why we were doing this and we ran almost a full schedule of flights starting July 2022 around the world owing to these stops,” he said.
“Tourism disappeared during this time. At the moment, we are almost back to 2019 revenues but passenger numbers are 65-70% due to some fleet challenges and have 18 aircrafts flying and hope to get back to where we were in the next 12-18 months. But we are not the only airline that is constrained around the world,” he added.
Mint
