Yesterday the Singapore Airlines have announced to start low cost, medium haul arm Scoot between Chennai/Amritsar/Jaipur and Singapore. In India, it’s the Singapore Airline Group which has the largest grasp over the aviation industry through its various subsidiaries so when such news comes from the giant group; it’s not a surprising thing at all. Some of the new flights will be set to go by 24th of next month and while some will start to fly from 2nd October.
These Scoot flights can fly up to 5 hours non-stop. If we are discussing about Singapore Airline group and its aviation accomplishments then, we must also know that it holds a 49% stake in Vistara and the remaining 51% with Tatas. Vistara is also likely to begin international flights soon after India relaxes the rules for domestic airlines to fly abroad.
Bharath Mahadevan, country head of Scoot, said “The SIA Group is the largest foreign airline in India in terms of reach as SIA, Scoot, Silk and Tiger will fly to 15 cities in the country. This is the largest after Air India (in terms of offering direct international flights out of Indian cities). Our strategy is to develop a new market (city) by launching flights with Silk or Tiger. And then when the market grows, deploy wide body planes of SIA or Scoot. SIA used to operate on the Amritsar-Singapore route from 2004 to 2008. The load factors were good at about 70%. But the full service model was not suited for this route. The A-320s of Tiger did not have the range for this route. Now, we will restart this route with Scoot that operates Dream liners on a low cost model.”
“Fare on India-Australia and India-Bali routes is in the range of Rs 60,000-70,000 and Rs 40,000, respectively. Scoot fares will about half of that,” Mahadevan said.
