Malindo Air Bets Big on Growing Outbound Tourists from India
The Malaysia airline does not see any threat from the growth of low cost, no-frills airlines and is also working on to increase frequencies of its services originating out of various Indian destinations, depending on the number of the traffic.
Malindo Airways, the Malaysian full-service airline owned by Indonesian Lion Air Group, headquartered in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia, is betting big on India’s outbound tourist to Malaysia. The Malaysia airline does not see any threat from the growth of low cost, no-frills airlines and is also working on to increase frequencies of its services originating out of various Indian destinations, depending on the number of the traffic. The airlines has added Kolkata as its ninth destination in India. The other Indian cities connected by Malindo Air includes Trivandrum, Trichy, Kochi, Bangalore, Mumbai, Amritsar, Delhi and Chennai (through its partner Batik Air).
"India is one of the important markets for us and we have been getting good response. Kolkata is a potential market in terms of outbound travellers and we are looking for good response from here," said Chandran Rama Muthy, the airline CEO. In the Kolkata -Kuala Lumpur route, the airline will have flights five times a week offering a seating capacity of 810. It has 12 business class over and above 150 economy class seats. This adds to 74 weekly flights by the airline from nine Indian cities including Trivandrum, Trichy, Cochin, Bengaluru, Chennai, Mumbai, Amritsar, Delhi and Kolkata, he added.
The number of India’s outbound tourists stood at 24.7 million last year. Out of this, 5.53 lakh Indian tourists visited Malaysia last year. This year, the number is expected to move up to 6.5 lakh to 7.5 lakh. In fact, nearly 3.07 lakh Indian tourists already visited Malaysia in the first quarter of the current calendar. “There was a 14.7 percent growth of Indian tourist arrivals to over 3.07 lakh to the southeast Asian country during the January-June period of the current year, compared to over 2.68 lakh Indian travellers, who had visited Malaysia in the same period last year. With increasing number of flights, Malaysia aspires to welcome one million Indians tourists by 2020,” said Malaysia Tourism Promotion Board's Director (North and East India), Sulaiman Suip. Compared to this 3 lakh Malaysians visited India last year and this number is also going up, he said.
Meanwhile, the general manager (sales and business development) Ramdas Shivram said that the airline is already experiencing growing passenger load from the cities where from the carrier operates."We already have two flights a week from Bangalore, three flights a week from Trivandrum, three flights a day from Trichy, 11 flights a week from Delhi and Kochin each," he said.
That’s not all. The Malaysian airline plans to add 200 aircrafts to its fleet size by 2022. The Malaysian airline, which took to the skies in March 2013, has a fleet portfolio of different formats- 29 Boeing 737, 13 ATR72-600 as of April 2018 and has already placed orders for 200 more aircraft including Boeing 737, Boeing 737 Max, said Shivram.