Anyone who operates scheduled air transport services on one or more of the routes under Category-I shall be required to provide services in Categories -II, IIA and III as per the DGCA norms.

• The operator will deploy at least 10% in Category-II of the capacity deployed on the Category-I routes, which indicates a service that connects to a station in the North Eastern Region, Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Andaman & Nicobar and Lakshadweep.
• The operator will deploy at least 10% in category-IIA of the capacity deployed on Category-II routes, which indicates services amongst the North Eastern Region, Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Andaman & Nicobar and Lakshadweep.
• The operator will deploy at least 35% in category-III routes of the capacity deployed on Category-I routes.

Note that while Akasa has time to align with these guidelines, if they want to run a well-balanced operation, you might start to see flights to J&K, Uttarakhand or the North East sooner than later. For the month of August 2022, Akasa operated only on Category I routes.

Akasa’s product offering

Akasa has a 189-seater aircraft in service at the moment, and all the aircraft entering service so far are fitted with Recaro BL3530 seats, with excellent padding and even headrests. That is unique for a no-frills carrier and makes for a comfortable ride. Air India’s A320neos use the same seats but with thinner padding.

Also unique is the onboard USB-A charging, which has been provided on all seats and is a generous offering for an LCC. However, without any streaming IFE on board or seatback holders for the phones/tablets, this is good to have, but one cannot use this for anything beyond the use case of actually charging your equipment.

What Akasa needs to get right, however, is its digital experience. Of course, they followed the strategy of launching first and figuring out the digital experience along the way, but that has led to a clunky experience online. For instance, there are no free seat selections until you get to the airport (a la IndiGo which will assign you leftover seats if you don’t want to pay for preferred seats). If you choose to skip selecting add-ons for your ticket at the time of booking, you will be unable to add them on later online and will have to reach out to the contact centre or their SM team to get it fixed. These things will eventually be fixed but are not there in the initial days. There are other kinks to iron out as well, such as GST invoicing, which is bonkers right now and is a requirement for all sorts of businesses for the time being.

Traffic Carried

Akasa made a reasonably okay debut, one that the airlines’ top management was prepared for. In the first month of operations, which was actually just three weeks of operation, Akasa got a 52.9% load factor, meaning, on average, you would see about 95 passengers on each of their flights. For comparison, other carriers did the mid-70s to mid-80s in terms of load factors. Akasa carried 24000 passengers through the three weeks of operation and got a 0.2% market share as computed by regulator DGCA.

Bottomline

Akasa seems to be growing quickly and following a strategy of mass impact rather than profitable growth in the initial days. Ticket prices being offered by the airline on some segments are cheap (BOM-AMD going for INR 900 or so), and the airline wants to establish both network and frequency quickly in the Indian skies. You might even see them flying International in 2023/24 itself once they get their 20th aircraft in. While many of their plans will unfold in the coming months and years, what remains to be seen for me, is the differentiated network they hinted at and what will be the product on the 737-8-200.

Where do you think Akasa is headed from here? What airports and what routes will come up for them in your reading?

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