Delhi International Airport Ltd, or DIAL, wants to make Indira Gandhi International Airport the next international transit hub. The Singapore and Dubai airports handle 140,000 and 110,000 passengers daily, respectively. And, half of these are transit passengers. They contribute 30 per cent to the total sales at the airports.
DIAL has seen a sixfold rise in the number of transit passengers to 6,000 in the past one year, but it’s just 7.5 per cent of the 80,000 passengers handled daily and contributes only six per cent to the total sales at the airport as per a report in Business Standard by Mihir Mishra.
“Around 80 per cent of our transit passengers are international and the rest are domestic. The international passengers are mainly from Bangladesh and Nepal. They contribute almost six per cent to the total revenue from sales at our airport,” said I Prabhakar Rao, chief executive of DIAL, a GMR Infrastructure-led consortium.
The Delhi airport operator sees a silver lining in the rising transit passenger numbers amid ballooning losses. DIAL, which spent Rs 12,700 crore on modernising the airport, incurred a loss of Rs 450 crore in 2009-10 and is expected to post Rs 800 crore in losses this financial year. It is losing Rs 2 crore daily after a court order stopped it from charging the airport development fee till the airport regulator allowed it. All that has led to an all-time high borrowing of Rs 600 crore.
The DIAL management agrees it is at a disadvantage, as it does not have a strong flag carrier to give it volumes. Air India (AI) does not have the strength to make it possible.
“That’s why we are talking to a lot of international airlines to use our airport as a transit point,” said Rao. DIAL is also in talks with the government to allow more private Indian carriers to start international flights. “There are various routes where Indian carriers have not been able to utilise their quota of seats, whereas their international counterparts have done so. If Indian carriers are allowed, we will get a lot of passengers and, hence, revenues.”
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