Garuda Indonesia Set for Indian Launch

Posted 14/07/2011

Indonesia’s national carrier Garuda Indonesia is currently discussing its proposed network development in the Indian market and could announce plans to inaugurate links between Jakarta and Delhi and Mumbai before the end of this year, according to local sources.  Earlier this year a revised bilateral treaty was signed between Indonesia and India allowing Garuda Indonesia access to the Indian market with traffic rights to the top 20 destinations in the country.

The airline is now working on its network strategy and is expected to initially offer a daily schedule between Jakarta and Delhi and Mumbai, latter adding flights to other Indian destinations on an up to three times weekly basis.  An estimated 142,000 O&D passengers travelled between Indonesia and India in the past year despite the absence of non-stop flights.  The majority of these customers used the flights of Singapore Airlines via Singapore Changi (37.3 per cent), Malaysia Airlines via Kuala Lumpur (23.7 per cent) and Thai Airways International via Bangkok (23.7 per cent).

Unsurprisingly, Delhi and Mumbai have the largest traffic flows with 31.2 per cent and 30.1 per cent shares of the total traffic from Indonesia, respectively.  Other key markets include Chennai (12.2 per cent), Bangalore (11.0 per cent), Kolkata (5.6 per cent) and Hyderabad (4.7 per cent), and all are likely to be included in the second stage of Garuda’s expansion in India.

Despite the absence of direct flights Indonesia is the second largest trading partner of India within the ASEAN market.  According to official government statistics trade between the two countries reach $12.6 billion in the past year, up from $4 billion just five years ago.  Local forecasts expect these figures to grow to $25 billion by 2015 although trade is actually increasing faster than estimated.  The addition of new air services will further expedite this.

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PLEASE NOTE: From March 7, 2012 schedule data for all news stories has been extracted from OAG Schedules iNET; All GDS data is based on a live GDS update on the day of publication; Traffic data extracted from IATA BSP system for the year ending December 2011.  All information is subject to change.