Not Delhi Or Mumbai, Bangalore Is Airlines' Favorite Hub

Mittu Chandilya, the CEO of AirAsia India, says the decision to locate the airline's hub to Bangalore instead of Delhi or Mumbai was driven by the latent potential in the city. Bangalore known as the country’s Silicon Valley is experiencing high diversity of people and providing a great potential for Airlines to expand their wings to start new popular and in-demand prospective destinations like Chandigarh, and Patna, which have no direct flights available.

AirAsia is going to put six out of its eight aircraft to service in the night with 40 flights to and from Bangalore by the end of December this year. It has plans to connect the city to several small cities in India. Air Costa, plans to add Patna, Raipur and Jodhpur to the network and IndiGo is gearing up plans to introduce five new flights from the city by October this year.

With airlines gearing up their services to and from Bangalore, fliers are enthusiastic about these plans. The main reason behind Bangalore’s increasing popularity is the lack of space in Delhi and Mumbai airports. “In Delhi, there is no capacity available in the 1D terminal which is the low-cost terminal. You have to go to the T-3 terminal. But you cannot have low-cost operations from two terminals as that add to cost. So you have to look elsewhere," says a senior executive of a low-cost carrier.

In 2013-14, Bangalore with its sizeable IT crowd had grabbed over 8.3 per cent of the country's domestic passenger traffic, which is much more than that of Hyderabad or any other city in the country.

As the airlines are making grand entries into Bangalore Airport, the authorities are working towards helping the airlines with the recent 40 percent discount on landing and parking charges to all airlines with their headquarters in Bangalore.

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