November 21, 2016 TnH Global

India is Changi Airport’s seventh largest country market, accounting for 6.1% of the airport’s total passenger traffic

Heading into 2017, Changi Airport will be offering more flight options for travel to India. A total of 13 weekly services will be introduced between now and the end of the year, representing an addition of nearly 2,300 weekly one-way seats to India.

Traffic between Singapore and India is at an all-time high. At present, India is Changi Airport’s seventh largest country market, accounting for 6.1% of the airport’s total passenger traffic. For the first ten months of this year, passenger traffic to and from the India market rose 5% year-on-year to reach 2.94 million movements. For the month of October, India had the strongest year-on-year growth (+12.4%) among Changi’s top ten country markets. In 2015, Changi Airport saw a record 3.43 million passengers travelling between Singapore and India.

Riding on the strong travel demand on routes to India, Indian carriers will be injecting capacity to the cities of Kolkata, Chennai and Bangalore. From 20 November, Air India Express will launch 4x weekly services to Kolkata. It will also step up its Chennai services, newly-launched in October, from 5x weekly to daily services. Meanwhile, Jet Airways will be launching a new daily Singapore-Bangalore service from 14 December; this follows after the airline boosted capacity by switching to a widebody aircraft for their daily Singapore-Mumbai flights earlier this year.

Since the beginning of this year, Changi has welcomed two new city links to India – Amritsar and Jaipur – both operated by Scoot, which is a new entrant into the India market. With new routes, increased frequency of services and upgauging of various aircraft this year, seat capacity on India routes has also seen a year-on-year increase of 20.3%.

Presently, Changi is connected to 15 cities in India, with flights operated by nine airlines. Singapore is a popular transfer hub for travellers between India and Australia, and between India and Indonesia. With strong network connectivity in the region, Changi Airport connects more than a third of the traffic on these two routes.

Changi Airport Group’s Managing Director of Air Hub Development, Mr Lim Ching Kiat said, “India is one of Changi Airport’s key country markets, and amid close bilateral relations between Singapore and India, we’ve seen growing travel demand from the market. The positive growth momentum has continued in 2016, and going forward, the addition of new flights from Singapore to more Indian cities is going to drive this further. We will continue to work with our airline partners to develop routes to the Indian subcontinent, providing more flight options for our passengers at Changi Airport.”