Airline To Operate Over 5x Weekly Non-Stop Flights To UK From Amritsar
With a aim to capture the highly underserved market between Amritsar (ATQ) and Birmingham (BHX), and make a strong hold over it, Air India (AI), recently has again announced to increase it’s frequency on Amritsar-Birmingham route.
The airline now will be operating over 3x weekly non-stop 787-8 Dreamliner services between Amritsar and Birmingham, w.e.f November 17th 2022. This comes at a time, when the British start-up airline, Hans Airways also plans to launch it’s non-stop services to Amritsar from Birmingham later this year.
The airline will also resume it’s Delhi-Birmingham route with twice-weekly flights w.e.f October 2nd 2022, and will later increase frequency to 3x weekly w.e.f November 16th 2022.
With 3x weekly services to Birmingham from both the cities, Air India would reach 100% of it’s pre-covid operations at Birmingham.
In addition to this, Air India will also continue to operate non-stop services between Amritsar (ATQ) and London Heathrow (LHR). However, the airline will reduce frequency to 2x weekly from present 3x weekly on this route.
As when the British start-up airline, Hans Airways begins it’s operations with over 4x weekly flights, with both Air India and Hans Airways, there would be over 9x weekly non-stop flights between Amritsar and the UK. This would probably make Amritsar the 3rd largest market, after Delhi and Mumbai, for the UK in India, by capacity.
The ATQ-BHX route has always been a goldmined route for Air India, as it always maintained an great average Passenger Load Factor (PLF). According to the data available for January-July 2022, the PLF of this route had been always been above 80%. The highest PLF on this route was recorded at 93.99% in February 2022, with the lowest at 79.05% in June 2022.
With the continuous international expansion of Air India from Amritsar, this represents the strong confidence of the airline in Amritsar for it’s short term as well as long term plans.
It is no doubt that, the airline in the near future may even develop Amritsar as it’s secondary international hub in Northern India after Delhi, to expand it’s network across Italy, UK and Canada.
This will let airline capture Amritsar’s huge markets, including, Rome & Milan in Italy and Toronto & Vancouver in Canada, which are indeed the largest in India.
At present, while Amritsar is the only city in India to be directly connected with Italy since August 2020, with charter services, Amritsar is losing all it’s Canadian traffic via Delhi on Air Canada, ME3 and European Carrier’s.